Notes From the Margins: On Reading With a Pencil

A friend borrowed my copy of a novel last spring and returned it with the observation that reading it had felt like being followed around a gallery by someone muttering. Fair. There are three colours of pencil in that book and at least one page where I appear to be arguing with myself about a comma.

I picked up the habit in the archive. You cannot annotate a parish register, obviously — but you keep a working notebook alongside it, and after nine years the reflex transfers. A text you cannot mark is a text you are only visiting.

What I mark

Not much, and specifically. I underline any sentence that does something I did not know was permitted. I bracket paragraph transitions that are unusually good, because transitions are where most books quietly fail and I want to see how the successful ones manage it. And I put a small cross in the margin whenever I feel a strong emotion, without noting what it was.

That last one is the useful one. On a second reading, the crosses are a map of my own susceptibilities, and they rarely appear where I would have predicted. I am apparently a soft touch for scenes involving competent people doing their jobs well.

The case against

The obvious objection is reverence: books are objects, and defacing them is vandalism. I have some sympathy. I do not write in anything old, borrowed, or signed.

But a working copy is not a relic. It is a tool, and a tool bears the marks of use. My paperback of a novel I have taught four times is a genuinely disgusting object and also the single most valuable book I own, because it contains not just the text but eight years of my changing relationship to it.

Start with a pencil, if the pen feels like too much of a commitment. Mark one thing per chapter. In a year you will have a record of your own attention, which is a rarer document than it sounds.