"One day, she went to the bookstore and bought 'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen, and as she started reading, she realized how much she wanted to remember about the book after she was finished. 'It wasn’t as intense or as thorough as I do now,' she said of her early annotations. 'It was mostly just little quotes here and there, maybe a word I had never known before, a star next to it, or an idea that I was like, "Oh, I want to come back to that."' Thompson began chronicling her annotations on Instagram and
TikTok.... Thompson... recently finished reading and annotating 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame,' a book she said she was glad she read carefully. Annotating slows down her reading process, but the output is worth it.... Annotating feels a bit like homework — an assignment you give yourself that allows you to use special pens and highlighters, colored sticky notes and whatever squiggles and doodles you desire. Maybe it’s not scholarship in the traditional sense, but it’s studious, nonetheless."
The
first post ever on this blog was about marginalia, and for a day "Marginalia" was the name of the blog. And as for "'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen," I can't read that phrase without recalling this line from my all-time favorite movie, "My Dinner with André": "I mean there must have been periods when in order to give people a strong or meaningful experience, you wouldn't actually have to take them to Everest.... I mean, there was a time when you could have just, for instance, written — I don't know —
'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen...."
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20 comments:
Not exactly marginalia, your series examining random sentences from Gatsby was the most satisfying suite of theme posts ever.
Perfect for Ann the Annotator.
Good for her. Just be sure to do it books YOU own. Personally, I've never felt the desire to write in the margins or underline sentences. Usually, if I want to remember a book or feel I want to write something about it, I write a short review on a Word Document.
Of course, some Althouse posts already serve as annotations of a sort, but we would enjoy more of them. Just a thought.
Please explain the "eight years elsewhere" that Icepick mentioned.
At some point as an undergrad, I took English Lit 203 or something like that and one of the assigned books was "Pride and Prejudice". I still have that Penguin English Library paperback edition, rather worn at this point after many re-readings. Maybe time to get in on my Kindle.
I just checked - I didn't make any marginalia or highlights but in the skimpy "Notes" section, the first sentences are "It is perhaps worth commenting on just how little requires, or would profit from, annotation to this book. Reference to topical events or other writers are almost totally suppressed, in spite of the fact that this was the age of Napoleon and the heyday of Romanticism. This perhaps contributes to the element of timelessness in this novel. . ."
I have no idea what other books were assigned in the class - I sold back all of the others.
Well, it’s Western Civ, so that’s a glimmer of hope. Unless all her marginalia were anti-Semitic cartoons and denunciations of the environmental impact of coal fires.
Modern Cliff Notes?
A post wherein I discover I'm hip.
"I mean there must have been periods when in order to give people a strong or meaningful experience, you wouldn't actually have to take them to Everest.... I mean, there was a time when you could have just, for instance, written — I don't know — 'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen...."
Not sure how to interpret this. Seems to be saying that written communication can be as powerful as scaling Everest, so "yay literacy!" But I keep getting stuck on using the adjective "just" to describe writing Sense and Sensibility. Seems wildly hubristic: writing Sense and Sensibility took a lot of time and enormous talent.
Reminded me of the post and some of the comments a while back that was on cursive writing. I wonder if the physical act of taking notes and annotating gives an additional experience that aids in processing and storing information in the book. I think it was Robert Cook, who in talking about the benefits of cursive said it was an early artistic and psycho-somatic experience for children. I suspect something similar is at play here with annotation. The act of physically annotating a book gives more benefit than merely just pausing and reflecting or rereading passages for a similar amount of time as spent on annotating.
Is this where the verbal tic "I mean" came from? My Dinner with Andre?
I love to watch my right-hand write.
I also enjoy watching my hands pull sounds from a guitar!!
I have always wondered why my left-hand was good on the guitar fretboard?
Annotating books is a lot easier than annotating movies. You need a whole team to annotate movies, a la MST3.
Personally, I almost never annotate, mark, or underline books except to note an egregious error, when it becomes my duty.
There is a difference in adding a note to the margins to explain something not initially clear to the reader, or of value to the reader, versus adding in the margin a correction to a typographical error or simple mistake by the author.
In Professor Snape's old Potions book, for example, Harry Potter found useful marginalia providing better methods of potion preparation than the original printed text. But in the Diary of Tom Riddle, Ginny Weasley found the abyss not just looking back at her, but turning her into a plot device!
You want annotation?
Pale Fire.
I bought a couple of used Dickens paperbacks to reread recently. A Tale of Two Cities had dozens of those mini post-it notes scattered throughout, all covered in a woman's handwriting.
It might have been one of hers. I threw them all away.
Isn't this a version of or a variation on a commonplace book? I've started such a couple of times, but it never stuck. I do still get a kick out of finding my old marginalia and getting reacquainted with an earlier me. I remember I was totally charmed by the copy of Herodotus the eponymous English Patient toted around in the movie. It was stuffed to overflowing with notes.
When I was young I read Adler's How to Read a Book. He recommended writing in books. I've obliged.
Mostly I argue with the author. The author is usually dead, so I always win.
Understanding Austen's novels are easier with the annotated versions, published a dozen years ago. We bought all six for an upcoming project in which we're watching and reviewing all the movie adaptations.
Not just the historicals, but the contemporary ones like "Bridget Jones' Diary." There's also gay adaptations, Hispanic adaptations, and foreign versions.
As we discovered with the Agatha Christie, She Watched project, a deep dive into one person's works can be enormously satisfying and stimulating.
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