@dogearedgirl
i write in books and i am not going to apologise for it. currently three chapters into something i am pretending to dislike.
Someone told me writing in books is disrespectful, and I have been composing a response for four days now, which probably tells you how well I took it, so here it is at unreasonable length.
A book is not a museum object, and I would happily make an exception for a first edition of something genuinely rare, which is a different conversation entirely, but a…
Reread something this week that I first read at nineteen, and the experience was close to meeting somebody who remembers you rather differently from the way you remember yourself.
At nineteen I thought it was about the love affair, which it is not, in any way at all: the love affair runs to about nine pages, and the book is very clearly about money and about…
Read two translations of the same book back to back this month and I am still turning it over.
One is forty years old, reads beautifully, and is by every account I can find quite loose with the original; the other is recent and careful and I did not enjoy a page of it, which leaves the uncomfortable conclusion that what I love about that book might be…
I have tried six annotation systems in about as many years and I am back, inevitably, to underlining with whatever pen happens to be nearest.
Coloured tabs: beautiful, abandoned in a fortnight, currently a drawer of tabs
A notebook alongside: works, but I stop reading and start taking minutes…
Half the books I remember best I read in conditions nobody would ever recommend: on a bus, standing up, in a corridor while waiting for something else entirely.
The version of reading everyone pictures, armchair and good lamp and two uninterrupted hours, is one I get about four times a year and mostly waste, because with two hours available I read the way…
There is a shelf I have not taken anything down from in three years, and I have finally admitted to myself what it actually is.
It is the shelf of books I want to have read. Not to read. To have read. Every one of them is on it because of who having read it would make me, which is a completely different appetite from the one that makes you pick something up…
A list of books I have implied I finished. No defence offered.
What interests me is that the lie is never planned: somebody says the title, you make a noise, the noise comes out slightly more affirmative than the truth, and then it is six years later and you are committed. Nobody has ever once followed up. The social cost of admitting it is entirely…