Here’s my dark confession: I scribble in the margins of books

The Australian writer Geraldine Brooks has just released a wise and nourishing book about grief. It centres on her late husband, Tony Horwitz, who died suddenly, too young, while on a book tour. He was, like Geraldine, a writer. And, like her, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

The book Memorial Days expresses Geraldine’s deep gratitude for Tony’s many qualities as a husband, father and writer. But she is also fearless in revealing her husband’s one dark habit. Tony was a scribbler in the margins of books.

Not library books – he was not a complete monster. But in the margins of the books he owned. He was also a sports fan and behaved identically in both enthusiasms: cheering and sometimes jeering, from the sidelines. He’d underline the good bits, question the accuracy of a date, add a thought, or sometimes question a whole project.

Those of us who love books may appear to be a united tribe, but our world is full of division. We’ll get to Tony’s book-scribbling in a moment, but it’s just one of the many schisms that divide the congregation of the bookish.

First schism: eBook v treeBook. From those on one side of the argument, real books can be lent to friends. They feel good in your hands. The paper smells delicious. They are a physical reminder, there against the wall, of the books that helped make you. Also, as Anthony Powell said through one of his characters: “Books do furnish a room”.

On the other side of the argument: eBooks involve less waste and fewer dead trees, plus you can read Fairy Porn, sorry, romantasy, without anyone knowing how interested you are in dragons having sex.

Is it OK to turn down pages? What about bending the spine so the book can be held in one hand?

Second schism: assuming you have chosen to buy real books, how should you arrange them? One view: according to the colour of the spine – the white ones at the top, followed by the yellows, then the oranges, with the dark colours below. It’s a method that’s much criticised, but it does look striking – and since you know your edition of Helen Garner had a blue spine, you can locate it with ease.

Argument on the other side? “Oh my god, can these people be executed immediately? OK, humanely, if you must.”

Others arrange their books by country and are criticised for it: “So nationalism is the only lens through which you can see the world? What a limiting idea.” Others do it by the date of publication and end up with The Commonsense Cookery Book nestled against James Joyce’s Dubliners, which makes no sense at all, even if both do sing the praises of Irish stew.

Or there’s my (possibly unique) method: organise it all by latitude. The Russians and Scandinavians on the chilly top shelf, down through the French, the somewhat warmer Greeks and Mexicans until you get to the southern skies of the Aussies and Kiwis.

The only trouble is you have to look up every author’s birthplace and determine the coordinates. Strindberg v Tolstoy does require some research, which I have done. Feel free to reach out for my findings.

Admittedly, some of the debates among the bookish are easier to settle. It’s fair to say that you shouldn’t eat your books. Menelik II, the emperor of Ethiopia, chewed the pages of his Bible during every reading. Legend has it he died after consuming the entire Book of Kings.

But other debates are more involved. Is it OK to turn down pages? What about bending the spine so the book can be held in one hand? Or (I hesitate to type it) what of those who will rip an airport thriller in half, so they only have to carry onto the plane the portion they are yet to read? Amid such bookish violence is scribbling in the margin, as Tony did, really so bad?

Here’s my admission: I do it too. I write hostile reviews – “this is rubbish” – and I instinctively correct typos. Most of all, I underline the bits I like and then, when I’m finished, write all those underlined bits into a notebook, hoping such fine writing might someday rub off on my own.

In Memorial Days, Brooks recounts how she and her husband disagreed about this marking of books: “I would no sooner write in a book,” she says, “than deliberately gouge a scratch in an antique table or scribble on a painting”.

Now, though, with Tony gone, those marginal notes are offering a way back to him. “If I pick up one of his books that I haven’t yet read, I can know what he thought of it.”

One of the books she chooses from his shelf is a famous book about the loss of a husband – Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion’s experience closely chimes with her own, yet she can also see Tony’s dismissive notes, scribbled in the margins years before. He didn’t like the book at all.

Writes Brooks: “I feel as if we are reading it together, having a friendly disagreement.”

Not everyone, I know, agrees with those of us who scribble in books. But sometimes, it can offer a slender lifeline.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.