To write in a book or not to write, that is the question

Since my blog's title is BookWoman, I thought I better write something about books, my chief passion in life. Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda underreacted recently when an online reader huffed superciliously that one must never write in a book, as every true book lover knows. Sadly, I was too late to enter the chat, but steam was coming out of my ears. Then a few days later, I was horrified when a woman in a book discussion group I was attending said the same thing. I couldn't believe there were two such "book lovers" in the world.

HOW DOES A BOOK LOVER NOT WRITE IN A BOOK? The better the book, the more you need to mark it up. (Except collectibles which you might sell, obviously.) Oh sure, you could use post-its, or keep a notebook with every book you're reading, but then your questions and comments and exclamation points are in one place and the actual words that inspired them are in another. What good is that? One of the things I like about library books and used books is seeing what passages were marked by previous readers. (Exception: highlighting, which should be done only when you have to take a test on the book and then never open it again.) True book lovers of the world, unite, pens in hand!

I just started re-reading Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. If you're like me and can never have enough books (or read all the books you have), it's worth a trip to the library or bookstore to enjoy the first few pages of this one, a catalog of all the types of books that can assault you when you walk into a bookstore. My favorite: The Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down and Really Read Them.

And there I was on the front porch without a pen when I came across this sentence: "Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears." And this was written before the internet! Still, it leads right back to what I wrote yesterday. Don't you love it when that happens?