I read a lot. It's a trait I inherited from my parents. But one thing about my reading deviates sharply from theirs. Whereas they keep their library in good shape, its shelves lined handsomely with hardbacks, my library mostly carries secondhand paperbacks. Whereas their books are clean: no underlinings, no highlighting, no notes in the margins, many of my books look like a pencilled toddler got ahold of them.
I once read that you can divide readers into two fractions: those who mark up their books (the "Markers") and those that don't (the "Clean"). The Clean scorn the Markers. “You're killing the re-sale value! A book in itself is a work of art! It's simply obscene! Die!
But the Markers don't scorn the Clean. Markers won't give up their ways, but they partly envy the Clean. I wish I had handsome hardback books lining my library's shelves. I wish I hadn't driven down the re-sale value of my books by writing in them (though, to my credit, I often don't write in my hardback books and never write in books that could have collector's value some day).
The first mark in a book is the hardest, especially if it's a new book. You write in a new book, and you torpedo its third-party re-sale value. Nothing depreciates faster than a new book that contains underlining (a new car driven off the lot comes close, or maybe NYSE shares). The small tick of tension with that first mark has always been unpleasant, but once I make the first mark, I unleash recklessly.
The result: I have hundreds (a thousand yet?) of books with underlined, bracketed, and circled passages.
Thing is, I've also never known what I would do with those thousands of highlighted passages.
Until now.
A little while ago, I started going back through my groves of defiled books and looking at my markings. I realized that the underlinings contained a lot of good stuff. I could spend dozens of hours just reading the stuff I underlined. . . . and do so profitably: Most of the marked-up passages hit me like I'd never seen them. Like the insensitive joke about the Alzheimer's patient that gets to enjoy the same thing over and over, I found myself enjoying the best-and-brightest passages in my library even though I'd read them years earlier.
It then dawned on me: I bet others would enjoy this stuff, too.
So I'm starting a new feature at TDE: "From the Highlighter." I will take a book from my library shelf and go through my highlights (actually, marks made with black pen; I don't like highlighters). I will re-produce the passages here and provide additional commentary. If a feature is longer than 1,500 words (and many will be), I will divide it into two days.
The first will run tomorrow.
