On marking up books
Inside Higher Ed looks into personal annotation in books:
To many people, of course, the idea of marking up a book seems distasteful – a violation of the text, a sign of disrespect for the author’s authority. The structuralist literary theorist Roland Barthes divided readers into two categories: those who produced marginalia, and those who left the book as they found it, instead writing their glosses elsewhere. Barthes himself belonged to the second category. He copied out extracts from his reading on what looks (in the reproductions I’ve seen) like small pieces of graph paper.
Do you write in your books? Does it matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction? If not in books, do you take notes on the side while you read?
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