I love to read, but I can’t say I love the two hundred-odd pages of reading I am assigned each week for class. Last January, with a sense of foreboding, I methodically went through my booklists and checked out all the texts available from Georgetown’s library catalogue. After multiple trips to Lau, the stack I ended up with provided an exciting representation of all I would learn this semester, but also a grim reminder of my soon-to-be diminished free time.
Yet, I have managed to get through my readings with an unexpected helping hand: reading partners who offer notes nudging me towards the most critical points and occasionally providing entertainment with their own reactions. Despite their importance to me, I have never met my reading partners, nor do I know their names. My connection to them is tethered to the penciled-in annotations they left in the books that we have, at different points in time, checked out from our university library. It is surprising, the joy I get from some graphite marks on a page. But through the unexpected support I feel from these past readers, these annotations have shifted my attitude on writing in library books.
I first gained an appreciation for annotated books my freshman year when I picked up a copy of Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros. The play—whose plot follows the inhabitants of a small French town gradually transforming into certain gray-skinned mammals—was sprinkled with highlighted dialogue, underlined words, and penciled-in question marks, leaving behind the trail of a previous reader’s thoughts. When a character undergoes odd behavioral and physical changes, my anonymous reading partner wrote “turning into a rhino?” in the margins, delightfully echoing my own inferences. I enjoyed the play, all the more so because I got to read it alongside someone else. Reading for pleasure is often a solitary activity, but these scribblings reminded me that someone else once perused these pages too.
In my academic texts, these annotations have shown me how my classmates can extend beyond those enrolled in my class. Finding study partners is a universal piece of advice for college students. I’ve found mine in the notes past students have left in the margins of the textbooks for my Chinese foreign policy and Taiwanese politics courses. With hundreds of pages to pour over each week, the underlined sentences, bracketed passages, and scribbled stars showed me what information my anonymous classmates thought crucial to retain and brought me comfort during late-night study sessions.
There is, however, a tension to my love of annotated library books, inherent to the phenomena itself: these books ultimately belong to the library, not their readers. Reading the book—and perhaps enjoying and learning from a previous reader’s penciled-in comments—is the point of the experience. But at the same time, library books are also meant to be returned, as much as possible, in the same condition as when they were checked out. How many people can write in the margins of a book before it is overrun with notes?
To me, perhaps paradoxically, these annotations remind me of the true purpose of libraries: to be repositories of shared knowledge. On the Hilltop, the voices of those who hate Lau are as loud and enthusiastic as those who vociferously defend it. I belong to the second camp, and my arguments don’t attempt to make up for its oft-maligned aesthetic shortcomings but instead focus on the amazing resources within.
Georgetown’s libraries house 3.5 million books, with 22 million more accessible through the Washington Research Library Consortium. Ignore the linoleum tile and fluorescent lights and go straight to the Lau stacks, where you will find more knowledge than you could acquire in a hundred lifetimes at Georgetown.
Blocks of shelves are dedicated to fiction from every corner of the world, translated and in their original languages. Nonfiction works cover the myriad subjects studied at Georgetown. The Booth Center houses historical documents and artifacts. There are even books of sheet music and medical dictionaries. A library is not a library without the intellectual curiosity it sustains.
Notes left (albeit illicitly) in the margins reflect the shared purpose of a library, reminding me of all the people who read the book before me. I feel a sense of solidarity knowing I am the latest in a chain of students to check out a book and enjoy its story or learn from its content. These books are more than a collection of pages bound in a dust jacket-less cover. They are resources that have passed through countless students’ hands before being checked out by me.
In this way—although librarians may disagree with me—library books are the perfect medium for annotations. When you check out a book, you get access not only to the book itself, but also to other students’ reading experiences and takeaways.
Am I suggesting you should write in the margins of the books you check out from Lau? Well, although my appreciation of annotated books has not yet overcome my wariness of writing in them, perhaps my hand is starting to inch towards a pencil. Start small. Write your thoughts on my article in the margins of this magazine. Underline a sentence or two in a book you pick up or star a passage you think is important. The next time you’re struggling through an international relations reading, think about the students who survived the class before and those who will face it in the future, and maybe leave a note or two behind for them too.
