Why You Should Write In Books
I don’t read so good.
I’m slow. My mind wanders. And I have almost no ability to retain what I’ve read for more than a week.
It’s a bummer, because I like to read and I read a lot. Say a friend tells me I have to see a movie they just saw and I have to read a book they just finished. The next time our paths cross, I will not have made the slightest effort to see the film, but I will have read the book. As for if I’ll remember any details, that’s a different story.
At least until lately. I’ve been remembering much more the last few years and I owe that to a simple hack: I write in books. All over ’em. I underline sentences I like. I jot notes in the margins. I write down what I think is going to happen. I scribble connections to other books or happenings in my life. Sometimes I don’t even respect the bounds of the margins and write over the printed words themselves. I’m a total badass who cannot be controlled.
I write the date I start on the first page. I write the day I finish on the last. If I give up on it halfway, I write that on that page, and why.
On the title page, if I remember, I write down where I bought the book and how much I paid for it. Was I with someone at the time? Did something momentous happen before or after? The Fire Next Time, The Boys in the Boat, A Visit From The Goon Squad… all coated in ink the publisher didn’t intend. And whether you’re a not-so-good reader like me or not, you should do the same.
It Improves Understanding
Most people learned this in grade school, but I didn’t. Writing things down helps me understand books better.
Underlining and adding marginalia makes me a more engaged reader (something middle school teachers are always saying you should be, but never explaining what it really means). Are the sentences interesting? Do the characters sound real? Does the author switch tenses? Am I even enjoying this book? Why not? All are questions I never registered when my only concern was cramming words through my eye holes as fast as I could.
It Helps Retention
This may sound similar to understanding, but writing things down in the actual book is an easy cheat for “remembering” the book.
I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved in high school. I don’t remember a single thing about it. I could read the “Plot summary” section of its Wikipedia page and get the gist, but that’s not going to help me remember whether I liked the book, what sentences I thought were beautiful, how my feelings evolved over the course of the book, etc. I’m going to have to reread the whole thing sometime to get all that again. [EDIT: Since writing this, I have reread Beloved, and now I never have to again.]
I read Stephen Fry’s The Hippopotamus in 2018. It’s certainly not a part of the literary canon like Beloved, and while I remember one or two things about it (SPOILER: a boy fucks a horse), it’s been long enough that I no longer hold any fully developed, permanent feelings about it in my brain. Unlike my high school copy of Beloved, The Hippopotamus sits on my shelf filled with marginalia. I can pull it down and, in under a minute, flip through my notes to see:
- It’s basically a detective story
- It’s fairly odd (SPOILER: again, a boy fucks a horse)
- It’s a bit hard to read because the narrator is a boorish, British poet
- Nevertheless, it’s filled with witty, British sentences
Is any of that important for me to recall? Probably not. I’d be really surprised if I ever have a conversation about The Hippopotamus. But I’ve still gotten more from it than I would have if the book was sitting on the shelf with nothing inside of it.
It’s An Extra Story
By now it’s clear I like books. I love wandering through bookstores and looking through people’s bookshelves when I’m visiting someone’s home.
[As an aside, I have a weird fascination with books in Airbnbs. Not the Airbnbs that are actually people’s homes, but the ones that are specifically designed to be rental properties. Who are these semi-pro hoteliers who think someone wants to spend their weekend in Austin reading a ratty John Grisham novel or a peanut-butter-coated self-help book on parenting?]
Whether you’ve sorted them by color (Hue-y decimal system) or have stacks lying on the floor, browsing someone’s personal library is a fun insight into a friend’s living space and brain.
Fun, that is, to a point. After all, I have no way of knowing if you’ve actually read a given book or not. I don’t know your relationship with any of them. I can ask, sure, but as I said above, you’ll probably only have something to say if it’s the rare book that resonated with you on a deep, private level, or if it’s the book you finished last week.
But! If you’ve written inside those books, I can pull out your The Dog Of The South and see if you thought what I did (random and overrated). I can see if you actually made it through East of Eden (you absolutely should). I can get a sense if you’re actually considering mediating or just like the way Why Buddhism Is True looks on your shelf (that red koi against a field of goldenrod).
Notes imbue books with a second story: the story of your time with it. Where were you when you picked it up (Cannery Row: at my friend’s apartment in San Francisco)? When did you actually start reading it (Hillbilly Elegy: two months after the 2016 election)? How did you feel about it (The New Me: radically upset)? When did you set it down (Against Everything: November 29, 2017, without finishing)?
And those extra stories don’t have to sit on your bookshelf. When a friend asked to borrow a book to read on a flight back, I handed her my marked up copy of A Visit From The Goon Squad. A week later, she told me she liked the book more than she otherwise would have because it felt like she was reading it with me. My thoughts were sealed inside for her to discover (or skip over, her choice) as she progressed through the book. Once she finished, instead of giving it back, she gave it to another friend, who also told me she enjoyed seeing notes inside. As far as I know, that woman passed the book on again.
I used to be nervous about loaning books out. I didn’t know if I’d ever get them back, and that would leave a gaping absence in my bookshelf. How will anyone know I read a Dr. Seuss biography if one is no longer in my room? I got over it. Now I love giving my scratched up books out. If this sentence appeared in a book, I’d underline it and write, “eye roll,” but still: the books carry me with them wherever they travel. I am now immortal outside of space and time.
I encourage friends to write in my books. Having a friend’s marginalia turns an otherwise private item into something richer, more social. My dream book is a copy of The Great Gatsby with the thoughts of all my friends written in different colored inks.
It (Arguably) Increases the Value
The only argument I can obviously see for not writing in books is that it will hurt the resale value. What riches must be locked away on your bookshelf, frozen in bound pages for now, but ready to be converted into a windfall by that grand minter of fortunes: the used book buyer!
That’s madness. If every book on my shelf were in mint condition, I could make, what, $200? That’s not a trivial amount, but when you factor in that it’s taken me six years or so to build up such a collection, I could be making back around $33/year. The benefits listed above are worth far more than $33 a year to me. If $2.75/month is more than you can spare, then you shouldn’t be buying books anyways. Libraries are chock full of free books (but don’t write in those. I have a notebook that I use to write down notes from library books, as well as less narrative works, like Sapiens, Evicted, Hit Makers, etc.)
Not only is marginalia not a huge financial burden for a purchaser of books, but in the long run, I argue it makes a book more valuable.
Last year, I was browsing through a small, dusty used-bookstore when I saw a copy of The Wayward Bus. I’d come across other used copies here and there, but it wasn’t until this copy in particular that I pulled the trigger and bought it.
This hardback copy sported, on the inside cover, a sticker saying it at one point belonged to one hell of name: Berta Bartholomew. There’s also a handwritten “Marelo 1947” next to an embossed stamp for the Library of Cranbrook Academy of Art (which Google tells me is north of Detroit. I bought the book in the mountains of Colorado. How did it make that journey??). The back cover still holds the library’s borrowing card, showing that “K Grant” checked out the book on November 11, 1958, and “L Jones” checked it out November 22, 1964.
So many fascinating little layers of mystery in a random, lesser-known Steinbeck book. I like to think that in 60 years, if someone picks up my copy of Cherry or The Sound and the Fury, they too will wonder about the lives of the people who once held this book and wrote all over it.
So write in your books! You see a sentence that’s particularly rhythmic? Underline it. Did the editor choose an annoying font? Tell the book that. Did you fall asleep in a chapter? Let future readers know.
And if you read on a Kindle, stop it. Support local bookstores.
