読書における書き込みへの葛藤
Hello, hello.
Oh, what's this? It's just me.
Looks like it's a solo episode today.
But, it's connected to something that we werechatting about, Asami and I.
Maybe one or two episodes ago?
It had to do with reading, right?
The effect of reading. This was a 科学系ポーテキャストのエピソード.
And this was sort of the inspiration.
I think there was something else that I was madeaware of that brought me to this.
But I'll talk about it as we go.
And you might have seen the likely title of thisepisode has a particular word in it,
which we'll get towards the end of the episode.
But in general, it's about writing in your books.
And I don't mean writing a book, right? I meanwriting in your books.
So writing in the margins, writing on theparagraphs, you know, underlining things,
circling things, highlighting things, words,phrases, paragraphs, right?
This sort of note-taking or annotation, which isnot uncommon, I think.
It might just be... I don't know.
I guess I wouldn't even say it's not like regionor people or group or even maybe individual.
Maybe it's more individual, right? This I don'tknow, right?
The inspiration for this came because we weretalking about the effect of reading
and how we read differently.
We read maybe visualizing what's going on.
Maybe we remember mostly just the vibes from whatwe read.
Maybe it depends on the language we read it in.
And I realized that one of the things I'veprobably struggled with
or at least challenged myself on since learninghow to read
and I was not always a reader, shall we say, aprolific reader, a child who enjoyed to read.
It took me a little while to find books and thejoy and sort of escapism in reading.
But something I had struggled with was I'd seepeople writing in their books, right?
Not everyone.
I would say it was at least uncommon around me
where even textbooks wouldn't necessarily bewritten in.
We would take notes outside of the textbook.
We would put them in notebooks, on maybe stickynotes, right?
We would copy things down from the book tosomewhere else.
But even as early as probably middle school,
I think I remember maybe just like one or two,right?
Friends or classmates when I remember them, youknow, sketching in the book
or maybe it was just doodling.
People liked to doodle even in their notebooks,right?
In the sides or edges of their notes.
And for books, I found this to be almostimmediately terrifying.
Terrifying?
It was deeply upsetting to, I think, younger me.
I think I saw books as this, you know, sort ofsacred type thing
where you would, you know, where you would onlysee this sort of special place
and time and world that, you know, I wanted topreserve
or maybe it was because I often saw books thatwere special in some way, right?
I just didn't want to ruin them.
Maybe this was imposed by, you know, the adults atthe time, right?
You know, taking care of your belongings and, youknow, going to the library
and making sure the books stay in good shape andthings like that.
But probably maybe high school would be earliestmemories
where people really start, you know, classmatesstart really sometimes discussing it
or like arguing over, you know,
like you're writing in your book and it's like,yeah, I'm writing in my book.
It's like that's helpful for me.
You know, it's like me engaging with the readingor something, right?
Not that they'd maybe write in the book that wasshared for the class,
but they, you know, they might write in their ownbook.
Maybe they would write in the book that was sharedfor the class.
Sometimes we would find textbooks that wereshared.
I don't know if this is an experience anybody elseis familiar with,
but we would have textbooks for one particularclass
shared amongst all of our classmates,
both in like a single class of, you know, 20, 30students, sometimes more,
but also with like the next period's class
and the books would just stay in the room.
So sometimes there would be, you know, notes andstuff left by other students.
And this actually, I think, segues us towards whatI want to get at,
which is actually sort of writing in the book
itself is this kind of special sort of uniquerecord keeping for some things.
And I just couldn't get myself to do it a lot ofthe time
because I was either worried about, you know,damaging the book
or making, I don't know, making a mistake in thebook.
That might also be something, right?
If I make a mistake, well, now it's in the book,right?
And I didn't want that to happen.
And by the way, maybe I should have said thisupfront.
I'm not recommending that anybody write in theirbook, right?
You don't have to. There's no reason to.
I'm definitely not going to do it, even by the endof this episode.
I'm not going to do it, you know, for every bookthat I come across.
But I think that there's actually some real merit
to this idea of writing in the books that we read
and in anything that we come across,
which is something we can, you know, kind of getour hands on, right?
You know, academic articles, no problem writing onthose, right?
Write all over the margins.
You know, I certainly do that.
It's the only way that I was able to absorb, youknow,
the information that was useful to me
or to start taking apart, you know, differentarguments
that an author would be making
or extracting little sort of fragments ofinformation
or phrasing that seemed insightful or interesting
or counterable.
Anyway, so writing in the books.
本を大切にする心と書き込みの誘惑
I think writing in books felt different thanwriting on, like, articles, right?
Or, you know, newspapers or anything else
that's this sort of you can print it off again.
But because a book was so unique and so special
in this, you know, published, printed way,
which is a, from what I understand,
very difficult process a lot of the time,
it felt like something to sort of cherish.
You know, you keep in the bookshelves, you keepfor display
and you don't let them get damaged in any way.
Yet, when I started thinking about books as, youknow,
not just enjoyable material, right?
Like a lot of my books early on were mostly forfun, right?
There were textbooks that collected over time,
but, you know, mostly it was fantasy books,
science fiction books, you know, stories
that you can still learn from,
but are not intended as, you know, instructionalmaterial.
And so I hadn't really thought about them in thisway before,
but maybe it was during probably undergrad.
So, un,大学生の時,
the English classes, my English classes,
which were like literature classes,
reading classes,
writing essays on the literature, right?
There were more students, right,
that started to, you know, write in the books
or, you know, like at least more writing about thebooks
and oftentimes they'd be kind of, you know,
scratching the books or they'd make copies
and they'd be writing on those, you know,
still some sort of protection of the book in somecases,
but it started to feel like, yeah,
sometimes I'd want to, I'd want to write in thebook
and it's like, whoa, you know, what do you mean?
You want to write in the book?
Yeah, I want to write in the book.
You know, this is the tension in my own mind
where I'd want to like mark something
to be like, I see this, I see something useful.
I want to remember this.
I want to point it out.
And I think during undergrad,
I mostly reverted to, you know,
writing it down in a notebook.
I still don't think I could get myself
to write in the book.
But later,
and I would say especially in the last few years
and while I came to Japan,
I got much more familiar with like erasable pens,
you know, not sponsored, but, you know,
friction pens, super useful.
And I did, right, start to sort of consider,
oh, you know, I guess I could write into these,
especially the textbooks here
or the workbooks and other things.
Workbooks, you know, usually I would write in,
but the textbooks, right,
for like when I'm studying Japanese, right?
I hesitated to even write in some of those.
I realized later
I had written in my undergrad Japanese textbooks.
So apparently I wasn't stopped then.
But something came back
and I started trying to preserve them
and then I was like, oh, man,
but there are so many different things
that I could use, which I could just erase it
if I make a mistake, it's no big deal.
And now I have, you know, textbooks
with my own notes and stories
and like, not stories per se,
but like my own explanations
and my own questions and, you know,
these things I can go back to.
And so all of this, this last, I don't know,
probably almost 10 minutes of me talking
is to get at how there's this tension
around maybe not writing
in the books that we read.
Maybe it's to protect them, you know,
for future readers.
Maybe it's some sort of a requirement,
a feeling that we ought to
or that we're obligated to, you know,
preserve them so that they can, you know,
sit on the shelf
or they can always look nice, you know.
Is that in the same vein
as not letting them bend too much
or not bending the pages on, you know,
on the book to leave a bookmark?
Some people are maybe cringing
when I describe sort of these damages,
these mutilations to poor books.
But there's something really
interactive and maybe even more engaging
when we are writing in a book.
Again, I'm not recommending it.
At least, you know,
especially if it's not yours.
Don't write in your friend's books
unless that's something
they're totally fine with.
It could be funny to leave some messages
if they're fine with it.
Definitely don't write in library books
because it's already hard enough
to, like, fund a library.
Although it could be interesting
to sort of have a book
or a set of books
that are intended for that
so that people could have, you know,
conversations in the margins.
Which I think is a good enough segue
Marginaliaの歴史と魅力
because I wanted to talk about
all this, you know, tension of my own
where it's like, I don't really know.
And maybe the answer for me is that
as long as I can write in it,
maybe erase it and, you know,
the pages aren't gonna, like, you know,
tear or something, right?
Maybe I will write in it
if I feel it really valuable to me
engaging with the material to do so.
But, you know, there are alternatives.
I could use sticky notes.
I could use tabs.
But this idea of, like, a shared book
and writing things in the margins
as responses to the author
is also a way to react
and respond to other readers
because these other people
who have written in the book
find themselves with notes
by previous, you know, borrowers of the books.
Again, don't do this in your library books.
But I'm bringing this up
because this is something
which, you know, has occurred in the past.
It's all over things like, you know,
biblical scripture and, you know, poetry books.
And if you go to old second-hand shops,
you'll probably find some like this.
They won't be the, you know,
the ones that are, you know, cherished
and in, you know, first edition,
you know, perfectly preserved condition.
They'll be the older ones.
And if you start looking around
at, you know, why do people do this
or, you know, what is the history behind it,
you find all of these examples.
You know, a quick Wikipedia page
that pops up will show you many of them.
And there's a word for it
which I'm not entirely sure
if the word originated.
I think the word originated earlier.
But there was a whole book
also titled this.
And the word is marginalia.
And I think I'm pronouncing that right.
So margin, like the white space
on the edges of paper
that you've printed text on.
Marginalia, things within the margin, right?
The writings within the margin in this case.
The drawings, right?
The doodlings within the margin.
And these were and are everywhere,
especially in older materials,
where you just see
either a reader's thoughts
kind of engaging with the material,
which tells like a secondary story
on top of the story that is there in the text.
You can see the evolution of thought,
as somebody questions or rejects
or doesn't like a passage
or some such thing, right?
And you, I don't know,
I think you gain something from it.
This actually reminds me
and I wish I could remember the book,
but there are a few books,
probably more than just what I'm thinking of,
that play with this, right?
I think maybe this is one of them.
I think it was like a kid's book
and it's also a movie.
I think it was How to Train Your Dragon.
I think the book
How to Train Your Dragon did this.
I'll check this maybe later on
and I can leave it in the caption,
but they left margin notes.
They're penned into the book
by the publishers and by the authors
to sort of create this second level
of communication or second meta story,
or narrative kind of going on
or at least a commentary
that feels like the writing
is a little more alive in some sense.
And it's just so cool
that we have a term like that,
marginalia,to describe this way
of engaging with written material
in a way that is sort of
next to and around, right?
It's not this formal structure
responding in a new essay
to the previous author.
It's just the ongoing live reactions
to the work in front of you.
And if it's something
that you're studying, for instance,
it's that thinking process
that sort of comes alive
a little bit on the page
depending on how much
somebody is writing.
And this is exciting.
This is like really exciting
to have that type of
multiple narrative layers
on top of the books we're reading,
the text that we're reading.
So if you want to read the book
Marginalia,I have not read
the whole thing.
I have read little snippets
here and there
before doing this recording.
I think there is a copy
that's technically available
on places like the Internet Archive,
which is a massive online library
which could certainly use
some more support.
I'm not sure if it's available
to everyone with an account.
Some of their books are more limited.
If it's not available there,
you could try other libraries.
It's older.
It's about 2001,
but I'm sure you can find it
around somewhere.
There are several things
that this book goes through,
examples of various
historical versions.
I think in Chapter 3,
something that stood out
because I jumped around to this.
It was about the motives,
like why?
Why do we do all of this?
I've been sort of pondering
that aloud.
Why do we write in the margins?
I've been doing that
for the last 18 minutes or so.
There is a poem in 1892
Marginaliaの意義と現代への応用
by Kenneth Graham.
I don't know much about this individual.
I don't know much about
any of these people in particular,
but there is a poem
that Kenneth writes
all about marginalia,
essentially saying
stuff written in the margins
is superb.
He sort of,
I think somewhat to the extreme,
says,
wouldn't it be great
if we had an entire book
of marginalia,
of just that,
just the writings
within the margins.
Somebody did, I think,
deliver him an empty copy
of nothing, nothing.
The entire book
was a quote-unquote margin.
There's no text in the book.
It's just empty,
which the author of the book
marginalia points out
is like, well,
I think if there's no text,
there's no margin,
but maybe a philosophical debate
for those that are interested later.
I think that the
sort of most interesting thing to me
is that when you have
annotations in the margin,
you have people thinking, reacting,
being alive in response
to these sort of texts,
and I don't think
that we should have it
in all of the books that we read.
I think that's a little too much.
It also might not be a thing to do
if it's not your book.
Don't mark up people's books
that maybe don't want it to be done
or you're not sure.
This is something to ask permission for
or don't do it at all
and leave the library books alone.
But, you know,
writing in a book
might give you a sense
of more engagement
with the author,
which is sometimes hard to do, right?
You know, if you feel
kind of separated
by just reading their words
and you'd like to be able
to be engaged with them.
And it gives you a story
of what the previous writers
might have been having.
You know, if this is a book
that's intended to be passed along
like that,
like from a secondhand bookshop.
Now, I guess what I'll kind of
wrap up with here
because those are a lot of things
I've dropped as, you know,
there's lots of history.
There's a whole, you know,
marginalia is something
you can look into.
I didn't find a whole lot
of academic papers on it.
You know, I found this book in 2001.
I found some spatterings here and there.
But, like, for the most part,
you know, it's maybe small,
a small subset of a field.
Or I'm wrong.
If somebody studies marginalia out there
and is, you know, aware
that it's much bigger
than I'm sort of reading into it,
please send us a message.
But what I want to get at
is that this is also about books, right?
Books in particular.
I mentioned earlier, you know,
it seems fine with articles
and things you can print out
and reprint fairly easily.
But for the things
that we have to go out of our way to get
which have been printed, you know,
for a particular way
and a particular style
and a particular purpose,
particular designs,
maybe we do want to preserve those things.
And I don't know if there's a, you know,
a right or wrong for that.
There is merit in preserving it
because there's a lot of work
that has gone into designing
and crafting that particular, you know, book
a lot of the time.
And if, even if there is though,
maybe when you have the book,
the best way for you to
sort of engage with the book,
digest what the author is saying,
you know, respond, react,
indicate, you know, counter,
you know, consider what your own thoughts are
might be to write in the book.
You could use a notebook,
but sometimes you just have the book on you,right?
Book and a pen.
And of course this is different
if you've got like an e-reader,
you know, an electronic e-reader.
You can make notes and stuff,
but it sometimes doesn't feel as tactile.
I will make notes in e-readers and do highlights,
but, you know, it can be a little less satisfying
as a personal experience.
I'm sure that everybody has had
their own experience with this.
I wonder if maybe my experience of,
you know, do not, you know, mark the book
is familiar to our listeners here,
to all of you,
or if it's totally different, right?
Because one of the things
I was aware of thinking about books
and specifically textbooks,
you know, when I came here to Japan,
you know, the Aka-pen and the red sheet, right?
And, you know, the blue highlighter, right?
To engage with books and material
in a way that is permanently changing,
sometimes, you know,
many of these pens are erasable,
but also, you know, very adaptable to studying
and ways of learning
and interacting with the book
that maybe don't involve writing notes,
or even if they do,
you have this sort of extra tool,
you know, a red sheet to engage.
So maybe the writing in the books is normal,
is perhaps even desired in many cases
that I'm unfamiliar with.
Maybe there's a greater proportion of people
who, you know, love to write in them,
to engage with stuff directly,
maybe because of these tools here in Japan, right?
Maybe it's just,
it's a different way of approaching thesetextbooks.
I have a hard time imagining
it's exactly the same for, like, you know, storybooks
and books you'd get from the library,
but I don't know, right?
I do not know what everyone's experience is.
So I'd be curious if anybody wants to reach out
and send us a message to our inbox.
Our link to the inbox will be in the show notes,
the caption of our podcast,
as well as I'll probably link
the Wikipedia article on marginalia
and maybe the poem
and perhaps the link to the archive book marginalia,
just in case you're curious.
But I'd be super curious to hear
if anybody is also struggling
or has also struggled to decide,
you know, do I write in this book or do I not?
Whether it was, you know, for something thatexcited you,
thrilled you, something you wanted to react to.
You know, did you choose to pull out a notebook?
Did you choose to just let it go?
Did you write in the book?
Or what's your general kind of feeling on itoverall?
Maybe, and this is not an obligation,
but maybe Asami will also reply to this in thefuture,
an option for her,
since I know that she has also started up a bookclub.
So maybe there are moments where, you know,
one wants to take notes for the book club
and, you know, wouldn't it just be great
if I could just write in the book
and then, well, maybe, right?
I don't actually know
what her thoughts on this might be.
So I'd be curious to hear those.
Again, not calling out Asami to do it,
but an optional, maybe in the future,
maybe we'll hear a response to this.
Maybe it'll be mixed up in a bunch of other thingswe do.
In any case,
I hope that you all enjoyed listening
to my, not a rant,
but a general excited exploration
on marginalia
and, you know,
again, don't write in the library books,
but if you find a way to engage
with, you know, books and reading
and written material
in a way that feels really valuable
and interactive to you,
I hope you get that opportunity
and I look forward to maybe in the future,
you know, picking up some secondhand books,
maybe specifically because they have that marginalia in it.
There are stories on stories
when you look at the past
written in the margins.
And with that, I wish you well,
and I will see you all later.
Goodbye for now.
That's it for the show today, folks.
Thanks for listening.
You can find us all next at Eigo de Science.
That's E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time!
