My sister writes in books. She underlines words and paragraphs, to help her remember important points and to be able to locate significant passages. When she was visiting a few months ago, she picked up a book of mine and started reading it. She didn’t have time to finish it, and I said she certainly could take it home with her. And she said, no, it was the sort of book that she would want to underline and write in, and she would just get a copy of her own.
Some folks write in their books. I’m probably at a disadvantage because I don’t. When I think about a passage in a book that I’d like to re-read, or think about more significantly, I’m at a loss, because I’d end up having to read most of the book all over again, because I didn’t highlight passages that were important.
But I guess I’m reluctant to write in books because I was always told to take good care of books and handle them well and, really, don’t write in them! Of course, that applies, mostly, to library books and school textbooks and books one might be reading while at Barnes & Noble.
At my library, there are some display shelves, near the entrance, where librarians put a variety of books and videos that support a particular theme, like football season, or summer fun, or Christmas. They may be informational, entertaining, short, loooong, and so on. I usually stop and scan the choices, and, last week, I got one to check out.
This looked interesting. It seemed like an easy read. I enjoy cozy mysteries, and it’s all holiday-centered, and there would probably be some recipes. I checked it out.
The first thing I looked for was recipes, and, just as I thought, there were several pages at the back of the book dedicated to cookie recipes.
Here’s what I found there:
Some previous library patron has written in this library book! I don’t know if the reader actually made these cookies and discovered that the oven temperature was too low, and the cookies didn’t bake right. And, even I might have wondered about the temperature. What’s printed in the book is a little low for cookies. Maybe the reader used the recipe and discovered, after the first cookie sheet came out, that that temperature was too low. Three-fifty is more the norm for cookies.
I must admit, though, that I would probably have put in a small post-it note with the better information, if I thought I should give some advice.
A page or two over, I found this. That seems pretty cheeky, to completely change an 
ingredient!
But, when I turned to the page number written there, I discovered that one of the bakers in the book’s cookie baking competition did indeed use virgin coconut oil as a scheme to have a prize winning cookie!
Anyway, after checking the recipes, I went back to the beginning to read the book. By the third page in, here’s what I saw:
This reader was editing the grammar of this book. And, really, I rather agreed with the changes. I read a few more pages and didn’t find any more “corrections,” so I don’t know if the reader didn’t find any more “problems,” or, maybe they found so many more that they just gave up. I read a few more pages myself and gave up, too. It just didn’t seem very well written, and I didn’t particularly care about the characters. It’s going back to the library.
Meanwhile, I’ve started reading The Bastard Brigade, the story of the men tasked with stopping the Nazis from developing the technology for an atomic bomb. Cleverly, the writer (Sam Kean) began with the story of Moe Berg, who, in between seasons as a professional baseball player, also graduated from Princeton and passed the bar in New York. Then, the writer moves on to a lot of science stuff, involving Marie Curie and her daughter Irene Curie and her husband, who blasted isotopes of elements and discovered all sorts of stuff, which I don’t really have a background to completely grasp. To help me out, there are diagrams, which I also do not completely grasp. But, it’s interesting and I’m hoping that we’ll soon be moving away from protons and neutrons (et. al.) and back to people.