Do you underline passages in books when you are reading them?
As I read a book, I often underline or highlight passages that I find interesting, things that I can relate to, or words that are really insightful. When I re-read some books, I often reconnect with these passages instantly, but sometimes I find them odd, and wonder what state of mind or stage in life I was at when I first underlined them. Do you do this? Have you made any revelations about yourself when re-reading these underlined passages? Perhaps your tastes changed over time, or you have grown wiser? Does reading these passages make you want to refocus your efforts and get back into a frame of mind that you were once in?
Just for fun, I skimmed through my personal library and found:
The book with the most underlined passages: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
The last passage I underlined: “Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.”
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54 Answers
Some books I definitely do highlight and underline passages, but most I don’t. Books for entertainment I definitely don’t highlight or underline. My copy of A Party of One: A Loner’s Manifesto (which I emphatically recommend) is filled with notations, highlights, underlines, bent corners, you name it. I even wrote a list of my favorite pages on the inside of the front cover. I’ve read this book countless times over the past five years or so and I still identify with everything I’ve marked up. Maybe if I gave it a break for ten years or so and came back to it I wouldn’t. I don’t think I could stay away that long though.
I don’t like markings in books.
I used to yellow highlight passages, put highlighting doesn’t age well.
It looks ugly when it gets old.
I’ve always felt that it was wrong to write in books. I know lots of people do it, and many great authors and thinkers have done it, but I just can’t bring myself to write in my books, whether textbooks, novels, or non-fiction, I just can’t do it.
@Snarp – I feel the same way. I want to, and I wish I could bring myself to do it, but some part of me just won’t let myself do it.
Instead, I’ve start putting tiny post-its (the ones tinier than your pinky) on pages that I think deserve “highlighting”. I stick them on the side of the page, corresponding to where the quote is.
Yes I do and I cheerish all my past underlining because they represent my lifetime taste and thought… I keep doing that and I have a special book where I rewrite most of them.
@tenderness – I tried writing quotes down once, but found it disruptive when I tried to do it while reading the book, and then got too lazy to do it after I was done with the book. :/
No, I was taught very early not to right in books. Looking back, that probably meant don’t mess up the Curious George with crayons, but it is deeply ingrained.
My favorite way to take notes on a book is to use an index card as a bookmark and make notes of page numbers and paragraphs, and perhaps why I find them interesting, on the note card. When I finish the book, I leave the notecard tucked in the book, so whoever picks it up next (whether it be me or someone else) can take heed or not at their choosing.
I did this when I was studying but not so much now! But an interesting way of reading, I may try it :)
Of books that I seriously study and also love as lterature, I will often have two cpoies. One a raggedy, heavliy underlined annotated version. Another a carefuilly preserved hardcover deluxe edition. My collection of Hesse, Mann, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Longfellow and Thoreau is duplicated in this manner. One for schorarship, the other for pride of ownership. Also a well-read collection of Tolkein and an elegant boxed set with beautiful illustrations. Same with my “Hitchikers Guide” sets. My battered set of “Doc” Smiths “Lensman” series has been added to with a beautiful boxed set from a specialty publishing house. My hardcover Heinlein set is now almost complete, had to buy a second h/c copy of “Friday” as my original was so dogeared and marked up. I’m nowclooking for a deluxe edition of John Varley’s “Gaea” trilogy. I recently acquired a complete set of Hermann Hesse in German with his own illustrations from the museum site at Calw.Future acquistions will be Steinbeck, Hemingway, Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Robert Graves.
The purely academic tomes are left hightly annotated and underlined. Ofter with copies of correspondence with the author folded into the pages.These are ‘working texts” only.
@imccreery That is a really good suggestion! I guess I don’t feel as reserved as some others about writing in my books, but that is still a really good way off collecting your thoughts, and always having them as a reference. GA!
I remember important things better if I write them down elsewhere. Something about the act of writing helps my memory.
I used to not be able to write in books – don’t know when that changed but I do it now – I fold the corners of the page each time I underlins something – usually I bracket an entire paragraph.
I don’t like to underline in books generally; I like to keep them pristine. However, if I am preparing a novel to teach it, I will highlight, underline and/or mark with post-its the quotes and passages I want to reference in discussion.
No. I also hate finding books in the library that someone has felt the need to scribble all over.
@Lightlyseared I hate that too. I’m reading a book from the library right now in which someone underlined passages. I keep trying to figure out what kind of person they are, and why exactly they thought some of these passages were worth underlining in a book they’re going to have to give back in three weeks.
@Lightlyseared I can’t stand that either. I would never write in a library book! What I meant in the question was do you write in your own personal books, and do you have reflections about yourself when you re-read some of the things you’ve marked.
Good answer, Snarp. Myself, I’m annoyed to encounter someone else’s markings. Whay they consider worth emphasising may be very different from mine. That’s one thing I like about e-readers—markings can be added and deleted.
The most I’ll do is light pencil in the margins. Whenever I looked for a used textbook in college, I’d find ones full of yellow highlighter, and I wanted to kill the former owner.
If it’s my own book, I do. I’ll also make comments in the margin. I think it’s cool to pick up a used book and be reading it, and someone, a stranger, has done the same thing. It’s like…a reaching out.
I remember I had this one text book in HS. It had been passed down through four people before it was my turn….the first dude who had it wrote a note for the next user to read the following year, then the 2nd user did the same….it was cool. Like four people I didn’t even know were saying “Hi there!”
If it’s a public book, I’ll mark the page with a sticky note.
Sticky note is a cool idea.
No. Color me old fashioned in my reverence for the dead-tree media, but defacing reding material is against my principles. I do, however, employ the digital world to bill the same need and to even better end, I believe. I keep an Excel Spreadsheet called Quotations.xls and store the names, quotes and if applicable, the setting or background for interesting things I read. It is WAY easier to find a specific quote I remember in this medium than to pull through every book I own and search hundreds of pages in each for underlined text. :-)
You know what I really wish? I wish the PDF format supported adding annotations. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read scholarly papers in PDF format and wished I could make a note right there in my version of the file. That would be cool, since it’s my downloaded version it’s not messing up anyone else’s file, and the annotations could easily be demarcated as such.
I used to be anal about keeping my books as clean and mark-free as possible but now I write in them all the time. I usually don’t underline passages anymore because it’s a waste of ink (learned that the hard way) and can turn a page ugly sometimes, but I circle items and page numbers, draw arrows, and use lines to indicate interesting or important passages. I also annotate, though not heavily (more extensive notes occur on paper, later). And sometimes I do a bunch of stuff.
Of course I only do this with books I own, and the books that I need to write about for school are more marked up than those I read for pleasure. But I don’t mind seeing others’ annotations in library books. It’s fun. Occasionally it’s even helpful.
@Snarp I use this program to do just that. It really helped me out in classes where the profs would post notes in PDF form, I could just make my own notes on them right there in class on my laptop.
@absalom Love the pics. Thanks!
@Snarp There are ways to use a pen with it, but it is not required (I never used the pen feature). You can just type to add notes or highlight sections of text.
@Lightlyseared I treat library books as holy relics. I only mark up “working copies” of books that I own.
(When I look back through my journals spanning the last 25 years, I come across notes I wrote to to my future self! And I’ll make new notes to my new future self!)
entirely off topic, but since it was recommended to me here I want to make a brief comment on Foxit, @pdworkin‘s free program above. It looks like a great program, and I will likely us it, but the installer will automatically install Foxit toolbar and set a default search engine and a couple of other things if you don’t uncheck these options. When you do uncheck them, you lose some functionality (not a really big deal). For those who don’t pay attention to installers but just click through them, they end up with a bunch of crap they never wanted and don’t know how to get rid of on their machine. I think it’s an unethical process that is sadly used by reputable software products (like Java) these days. But I appreciate the recommendation and the software is fine once you get past the installer. End off topic ranting. Sorry.
@Snarp Thanks for pointing that out. I always do an “advanced” install with any program, because who knows what they will do without supervision?
Schoolteachers prohibit writing in books that must be passed on to other students. Librarians of course have to protect the collection for all users. But personal property is another matter. My father was a professor, and I always saw him read with a pencil. I adopted the same habit, mainly but not exclusively for nonfiction books; I tend to regard them not as a monologue by the author but as a dialogue between the author and me.
Some authors’ and thinkers’ personal libraries have been most valued for their marginalia.
Apart from textbooks, I never use highlighter (what is more useless than a textbook that is wall-to-wall neon yellow highlighter?), and I don’t underline unless I have a straightedge handy because it makes the pages look messy, but I do have a variety of marginal markings and symbols. I also evolved the following custom of my own: when I encounter a striking thought or simply something I know I may want to refer to later (especially if it is not in the index), I make an arrowpoint (a sideways check mark) beside it in the margin, and then on the blank last page of the book I note the page number and a phrase that reminds me what that point was about; for example, “243 all art is deception.”
@Jeruba All art is deception? That’s…profound!
@Snarp, Acrobat Pro will let you do that. Features include highlighting, inserting boxed notes, inserting boxed popup notes, making graphic lines and arrows, rubber-stamping, and actual mouse- or stylus-controlled hand-marking. I used this tool for editorial work. At no time was it ever better or more efficient than what I could do with a writing implement on actual paper, but it had the advantage of being readily transmissible to writers in Bangalore.
@Val123, I don’t know if you’re being facetious or not, but that is just an example out of the air.
@Jeruba My grandfather and mother were both university professors. I was taught to read with pencil in hand and use standard markup/ marginalia symbols from the time I learned to read. This computerized stuff throws me though. Unless its on paper it’s not “real” to me. +GA
@Jeruba But i’m not paying for Acrobat Pro just to do annotations. It’s a pretty simple feature that doesn’t really have to do with the reason one gets acrobat pro, which is creating and formatting PDFs.
@pdworkin Are you saying you can do all the formatting and creating of PDFs in Foxit? I haven’t looked too far into it yet. Funny though the stranglehold a company can have on a field based on name recognition, isn’t it?
I do my underlining and highlighting in books before reading them, so I know which parts to skip and which to read.
@Jeruba No…I’m serious! It was really a “Wow! That’s true!” moment when I read it! I mean…it is.
Yes, if the book is a paperback. I try to keep my hardbacks in good condition. When I do underline, I use a mechanical pencil so that the markings can be easily erased.
@Austinlad To each his/her own. When I get a secondhand book, I actually like to look at the underlined passages, because then I can imagine what type of person s/he was and why s/he thought that particular passage was so important.
I know it can get time consuming, But I will copy something of interest on a seperate paper. I don’t like marking in books, it can be distracting and breaks my concentration when I re read a book. That and any book that affects me to want to remember a passage, will be read over and again many times.
I never write in books. A lot of people do, but I think it ruins the pages. I hate dog-ears, and don’t let my sister borrow my books anymore because she’s ripped too many pages…and broke the spine of one of them. I may be really protective, but my books are really important to me. I have had to mark in a book we’re reading in my AP English class, so I guess that’s a different situation. I just try to remember or write down page numbers to look for important parts later if I want to.
I write and underline all over my books, in pen. To me, it’s an expression of love for the text. I never understood people who write on them on pencil – is it that you think you might be erasing later? I do that for library books, sometimes, but it’s always pen for my own books. Pilot G-2 rollerballs, yea!
@Jeruba There’s a trick to underlining freehand: it’s all about holding your hand above the line and then allowing your wrist to move in its natural curving motion as you draw the underline. Pick up and put down your hand to complete it all the way along, rather than straightening out your hand and dragging across. Works every time, even on the subway.
I definately write a lot in the books I own. Mostly, I do so in Bible whenever I come to an interesting or confusing section. I often go back and understand more about it.
No, I don’t mark up my books. I have a thing about neatness, and when I borrow a book from the library, I get miffed at underlined and highlighted passages. I realize that people do it to remind themselves of a relevant passage, but it just looks messy to me.
@wildpotato, that method doesn’t satisfy me. It still wobbles. I carry a six-inch ruler if I am really serious about a book and also have to read it away from home. An index card will do in a pinch. But for the most part I see no need to underline the text; marginal markings are sufficient to indicate the passage of interest.
And I use pencil because I can get a sharper point, because it doesn’t bleed through, and because it is more aesthetically pleasing to me, being in better harmony with the page and the print. Occasionally I do mess up—such as, when marking cross-references, I write the number of the page I’m on instead of the page I’m pointing to—and then I do erase.
Yes I do. Yay I’m not the only one. :-)
Of-course I do because when I read something that really impresses me, I must share it and how would I ever find the passage if not underlined. Extreme book defacer.
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