Why You Should Write in Your Books
By: Beth Bruno
Tags: Life Lessons, Reading, Books, Legacy, Self

Why You Should Write in Your Books

Leaving a legacy in the pages of your books

Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash

How do you feel about marking up your books? I find there are two camps when it comes to this.

My husband’s camp believes it is a travesty to make a mark in a book. The closest he will ever come is discreetly turning the tiniest corner of a page down to remind him there may be something he wants to come back to.

Then there are those of us who read with a highlighter and a pen or pencil in hand, generously covering pages with swaths of yellow and copious margin notes. It doesn’t matter what genre — fiction or non-fiction — it is rare for me not to find something worthy of highlighting and commenting on. I mark and highlight with wild abandon.

The difference between our ways of reading our books is like the difference between cutting a peach up and eating it politely with a spoon or biting into it and letting the juice run down your chin and your elbows. I prefer the latter!

The margins of many of my books are filled with comments like “Are you kidding me? Uh, NO.” Or the opposite — “YES!” with a row of stars and exclamation marks. Sometimes the notes are more thoughtful and I make observations about how this relates to me at this moment, or how I can use this to change my thinking or live a better life. I always record the “aha” moments in the margins.

Many times I highlight and comment on passages that are so beautiful they take my breath away. If a sentence or paragraph raises the hair on my arms and gives me cold chills, it’s a candidate for memorializing in my book. If it makes me cry it definitely gets the yellow highlighter treatment and a few comments.

When I go back to my books, sometimes years later, I always find it illuminating to see how a passage affected me when I read it for the first time. It is also enlightening to see how these particular words have become part of the fabric of who I am. Many times the things I have marked in my books were the stepping stones on my path to living my best life. When I look back, I can say “Oh, so that’s where I was in my life when this idea blew me wide open.”

That’s why it’s important to also put the date beside my comments. I haven’t always done this and many times I have regretted that I could not remember when I read something that changed me. Now, I regularly put the date and then, when I go back and read the book again, I may highlight something different and I put the date next to it. It is like a journal of sorts, tracking my journey through life as I have learned to be human from the books I have read.

I love to pick up a book that belonged to someone else and find the margin notes and passages they have underlined or highlighted. When I am shopping in a second-hand bookstore I never reject those that have been marked. Rather, if it has marks in it I find it more alluring. Someone loved this book enough to mark these passages and it must have resonated with them. I take it home hoping to find the same resonance. But even if I don’t, I find I have a different relationship with books that someone else has marked. I am more aware of reading as if I am looking for clues, following the trail of breadcrumbs left by the previous reader.

I come from a family of readers and when I find marks in books that belonged to people I love it is such a thrill to me. My father had such a beautiful handwriting. He was a trained engineer and his drafting handwriting was lovely, but his cursive was spectacular. Whenever I come across a sample of that handwriting I always gasp and feel a chill creep up my spine. It is like being connected to him once again, even though he has been gone for 20 years now. I love finding margin notes in books that he read.

One of the best things he ever did was start a reader’s log in the back of Ferrol Sams’ book “Christmas Gift”. It was a tradition at Christmas for my family to read this book and many times somebody read it out loud to the rest of us. In Daddy’s beautiful hand on the back fly leaf he wrote “Read by Larry Nash, Dec. 1986”. After that, every person who read that book, either aloud or to themselves, signed the reader’s log and dated it. It is a family record, almost as important as the births and deaths in a family Bible. I am so glad my dad made marks in his books for me to find.

My mom marks her books, too. She is doing a lot of reading right now and I am taking bags of books to her on every visit. A lot of the things I am taking her I have not read, because my appetite for purchasing books far exceeds the time I have to read them. So when I take her a new supply, many times I have to say “I can’t recommend this because I haven’t read it.”

She has loved most everything I have taken her, but she came across one she especially loved and she told me over the phone one day that she read the last page and immediately started over. Wow! A few days later she said how hard it was for her not to mark that book up, but because it was mine she refrained. “Mark it!” I said. “I will love having your marks in my book when you are gone. How will I remember what it was you loved about it unless you mark it?” She said she didn’t think about that and would go back and mark it.

My mom is suffering from a serious illness and we don’t know how much time we have left. But knowing that I will have these parts of her preserved in her (and my) books is such a comfort. Leaving herself on the pages of our books will be a living legacy that I can go back to over and over and pass on to my own children someday.

And I hope that one day, when my kids are clearing out my things, they will come across markings in my books that will give them a window into my soul. Maybe they will get a little clearer picture of who their mother really was, and an appreciation for the power that my books had to shape my life.

They are big readers, too, so I am pretty sure they won’t just box them all up and ship them to the Goodwill. But if they do, I hope that someone will pick one of them up and see my markings and decide to take that book home to read for themselves. Perhaps the part of me that I left behind for them to find will enrich their reading experience, like so many others’ markings have enriched mine.

No matter what camp you are in, if I have not convinced you of the value of marking up your books, I hope I have at least made you understand the people in your life who read with pen in hand. Maybe now you will stop glaring at them and rolling your eyes as they “deface” their books.