This photo of 1479 marginalia was taken by Philobiblon.

This post is brought to you by a 360 degree reversal in the reading mode of its writer. If you follow me on Twitter you may have seen a tweet I posted a couple of weeks ago about my sudden and compelling urge to write in the book I was reading… by the next day I’d posted another tweet to say I’d gone and done it. I’ve since made notes in two books.

I say ‘sudden compelling urge’ because I have had sudden writing urges before but they’ve never been quite compelling enough for me to actually pick up a pencil – it’s got to be erasable – and change my stance. The strength of it was a bit silly really but then I suppose it was the opposite of how I usually feel.

Others write in books. Many of my classmates at school scrawled all over their poetry books. I did too because I had to but even back then, during the time I wasn’t reading for pleasure, I felt books were… sacred. Not to be sullied. Interestingly I have no problem with other people writing in their books; I believe it’s each to their own, but me and mine? No chance.

The reason I never wanted to was because I’m always worried that a re-read would be dominated by my past thoughts and whilst on the whole that’s no bad thing – interesting, almost, because you’d have definite comparisons there between then and now as opposed to having to remember what you thought – I can be easily distracted, that attention span thing, and I know that when I’ve come across underlined or highlighted text when going through photocopied book extracts while essay planning, I get stuck on those sections that the person before me deemed important. And I always think that while they may be important sections, they might not be in my specific context or – god forbid – I might end up taking a bit more from the source material or friend’s notes than I meant to.

A friend once photocopied a chapter of a book for me that our lecturer had photocopied for her. My friend was effectively presenting me with source material only she had. I felt uncomfortable anyway because I knew that if I used it I’d potentially be writing about things that previously only she could have, but her highlighting had me worried – I didn’t want her own planning to weave its way into mine. Like my reviewing process – read others’ reviews after I’ve written my own – I worried some of her work would creep into mine no matter how much I was aware of the possibility. Once you’ve crossed that border, even if you don’t actually use someone else’s work whether by accident or on purpose… just that worry that you will and the lengths you’ll go to to ensure you don’t can be exhausting and can negatively affect your own work.

Back to writing in books myself – I chose a pencil. I wrote in the whitespace. Emboldened, I progressed to underlining lines, sectioning paragraphs I liked, scribbling everywhere. Once I started I figured I’d write whenever I wanted. In a soft pencil. Very lightly.

Afterwards I was regretful. I’d crossed the line. I could erase the markings but knew it’d be difficult and anyway, it would scuff the pages. This feeling remained for a few hours. The next day, reading a new book, I came to a place where I knew I had to write everything or I wouldn’t be able to continue reading. I did it again.

Here’s the thing – these two books? Two of the shortlisted titles I’m reading as a shadow judge. I suppose it’s different; it certainly feels so. I feel a greater sense of needing to get it right, to remember all my thoughts, to understand the nuances of the texts.

And it’s just easier to have my thoughts – all of them – to hand. I like to make copious notes when reading. I use notebooks, and once I’ve written the review I tend to leave the rest of the notes behind where at some point, when the notebook’s used up, they’ll end up in the shredder. I rarely keep my notes, precisely because I don’t have a place to keep them. I’ve considered a commonplace book but the idea of trying to categorise multi-category notes is daunting. Some books I read are lucky; I store their notes on the computer. Others are lost forever if the thoughts don’t make it into my review, and that’s most of them because if I included them there would be “ah ha!” and “excellent!” and all sorts of other notes and copyright-infringing amounts of text that even I wouldn’t read.

Will I continue? I really don’t know. But I guess under the surface I am a writer in books, or, as I said on Twitter, I’m a Person Who Writes In Books. And I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel comfortable with that but then it’s a lot better than it could be.

I could be using a biro.

Do you write in books?