(I've been watching Doctor Who trying to catch up, so yeah kinda obsessed with it right now. Besides I'm sure my friend will like this post just for the fact that it has Doctor Who gifs haha)
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Writing on Book Pages
So I just started a new semester at college, and since my major is English, I had to buy like 20 books! Now everyone knows that college students are poor! So we all buy used books because they are cheaper. Well in the bookstore of my university I was skimming through the books trying to get ones that didn't have any writing on them. I was lucky to find some, but still I was horrified by how many books had pages almost fully highlighted!
And my horror didn't end there! After I purchased my book, The Catcher in the Rye by the way, I went to class and opened the book to read. One of my fellow classmates sat down next to me and we started to discuss the book. One moment we were having fun talking about the book and the next moment I look up and see her writing in her perfectly new bought book!!! Those new smelly pages were being tortured and replaced with the horrendous odor of highliter and ink! So when I asked her why she was writing on them she said because she wanted to mark the important parts. Which I replied with, "have you met the sticky notes cause I have a bunch of them and I can just give them to you, so that you can stop torturing the poor book!!!!" and then she told me that if she needed another clean book she could just go and buy another one. By this point my face was just comical by the way I was starting at her in shock.
She not only tortured the book but it didn't mean anything to her, probably after we are done with the book she will throw it in the trash or something. Me on the other hand, I've always seen books as holy items that you do NOT write on or replace! I feel like books have history in them, maybe I'm just a big sentimental person but that's my view on marking books. So how do you feel about writing on books.
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I normally agree with you. If it's a book I bought for my own reading pleasure, completely unrelated to university, I'd never ever write in it or doodle in it or basically use anything to mark it apart from sticky notes.
ReplyDeleteFor university though, I started underlining stuff with my biro, putting exclamation marks next to paragraphs, writing notes inside the book during discussions because it made it easier for me to go back and understand what we were on about before a test. It's easier if everything's in one place instead of having sheets of notes and not being sure where in the book they belong to. So basically, I make a huge divide between uni-books and non-uni-books. I also tended to buy the ones for university secondhand and cheaply, so it mattered to me less. Most of their spines were already broken anyway, which is something I never, ever do to my own paperbacks.
I actually like opening my old uni books now and seeing a 'map' of notes in them, then try to reconstruct what 20 year-old me was thinking when she underlined that sentence or circled something.
Great idea for a post :)