From Real Life Magazine:
I don’t know when I started writing in my books, but I know when I started to notice. I was in my mid-20s, recently graduated and relearning the pleasures of reading for myself, which was part of learning how to be in my own company. I’d moved to a closet-sized studio apartment crammed with stuff I loved, and I was building my nest in the world with the standard invigorating arrogance. Writing in books felt like coating the text in my enzymes, assimilating it into whatever I thought I was becoming.
It was around this time I read Marginalia by H.J. Jackson, the first formal, book-length study of the practice. Jackson is a former professor of mine, and a scholar of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was known for his voluminous margin notes — friends would often ask him to mark up their books as a favor — as well as for popularizing the term “marginalia.” Jackson’s book, for which she examined over 2,000 manuscripts, is a general history of marginalia as a social and personal practice, as well as a study of its uses and motivations. Annotation is, Jackson writes, a process of identity formation: “A marked or annotated book traces the development of the reader’s self-definition in and by relation to the text. Perhaps all readers experience this process; annotators keep a log.”
. . . .
“Writing in books is the closest I come to regular meditation,” the critic Sam Anderson wrote in a New York Times Magazine essay I remember clipping when it first appeared. (Anderson has published his own marginalia, in the Times Magazine and the Millions.) Marking up white space, he said, is “a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with the author on some kind of primary textual plane.”
. . . .
“Marginalia — with its thrill of shared immersion — is what the culture is moving toward, not away from,” he wrote. “We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world.”
. . . .
Half a decade later, already a different era, I packed up my tiny apartment in the process of moving to a bigger city. I piled up all the books I had no intentions of rereading and thought with some initial excitement about who I might pass them along to — who might pick them up from the curb — and how their impressions might align or collide, at least in the abstract, with mine. Then I opened one, and saw my own strident observations shrieking up at me in bleeding ink. The notes seemed foul, the waste products of a self I’d repudiated; there are few people more objectionable than the person you were until recently. As objects, the books seemed cursed in reverse: To most readers the notes would be nothing more than an eyesore, but to put them in circulation would somehow manifest versions of myself that no longer felt familiar, and seemed to risk preceding me.
Link to the rest at Real Life Magazine
I’ve never liked annotating within books. I put my notes in files, mostly novel related but not always.
For pre-existing notes, very few rise to the level of Blake or Coleridge.
If it’s a book I don’t intend to re-read, why keep it just for my own comments which can be saved elsewhere & usefully organized?
More importantly, if it’s a book I expect to re-read, I want my earlier reactions saved elsewhere, so my re-reading is relatively fresh: I want to notice new points or references or nuances, without sticking to the groove marked by earlier marginalia or highlighting.
I can’t write inside of books, that is defacing something, but as a writer I was excited by the article, trying to see how I could duplicate the process in paper books. Seeing how to do that in ebooks, defeats me. I’ll have to play with the idea more.
– There are whole stories where the marginalia would overwhelm, supersede, the original text.
– I see it as a tool to give insight into the character. A place where they could express themselves, and thus reveal themselves for Story.
Take a book, movie, or TV series, and write diary entries by the character about how they feel about the book/movie/TV series. Think of all the women who use the “Sex and the City” theme as the ringtone on their phone. When you hear the ringtone, what does that say about them? How do they see themselves and the characters from the show? Which character do they want to be?
I’ve harvested many a story theme of a person obsessed with Snow White, Romeo & Juliet, Wuthering Heights, etc…, and how they see themselves through the lens of their favorite story. After all, What Would Jane Austin Do?
– Too many people sit trying to figure out what to write, and finding the character through the stories that they obsess over is one way to see them.
Take Duma Key by Stephen King.
There was a time I read Duma every week, week after week. Each time I read the book, I would argue with King about what Edgar would do. Then the next time I would say, “No, I was wrong. I see why things happened this way.”
In the process I saw Duma as the first book in a series, and I will write the rest of those books in the series, never to be published.
I look at writing sequels not as “fan fiction” but as a way to play in that world, see useful things that I can use in my own stuff, and no one will be aware of the source. HA!