Someone told me writing in books is disrespectful, and I have been…

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 paperback I bought for eight pounds is a tool for thinking with, and a tool that shows no wear has simply never been used.

What the margins are actually for

Mine are not analysis, they are almost entirely arguments, and mostly bad-tempered ones: "no", "you already said this", "this is the good bit", "why is she like this". Six months later I reread, and what I am reading is not really the book any more but a transcript of a conversation between the book and a slightly stupider version of me, who was, irritatingly, right rather more often than not.

The alternative is a clean copy I remember nothing whatsoever about, and I have whole shelves of those from the years before I started, sitting there being decoration.