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Dear Readers: Stop Annotating Inside Your Books.
You enter the scene: The sky is a solemn grey, coloring the landscape with a damp pallor that matches the recently deceased. Huddled beneath a cascade of black umbrellas, an obscured blend of faces surround the funeral scene. Herein lies the nesting ground of freshly thrown lilies, a murder of mournfully cawing ravens, and finally, the conspicuous reader in a loud, cherry raincoat yelling out “OMG. She died!”
Pause. Blink twice. The immersive illusion of wordplay and wit is shattered by handwritten note in an ugly shade of red ink on a hand-me-down copy of Beloved by Toni Morrison. And no one seems to see any problem.
At very least, the recent trends in social media virality have certainly done its part in convincing me that my hatred for book annotations places me in the minority of readers. It seems to me that readers across the spectrum, from the scholarly literary academic down to the common book enthusiast, readily embrace the practice of embellishing their paperbacks with their personal commentary and analysis via marginal annotations.
Annotation itself is a healthy skill, of course. The exercise of deconstructing someone’s literary ideas can build inconsequential analytical skills that can broaden one’s own worldview.
