I bought a used book the other day at a bookstore in Ballard. It was an impulse purchase, mostly. As I read it I noticed it was highlighted in a few places. Not many, not often, not enough to be distracting, but it was there: a blue highlighter on a few of the lines. At first it was solid and smooth, but as the book progressed it became haphazard, as if the reader before me had only cared that there was some marking on each of the lines rather than that the whole line be highlighted.
I wonder why. I wonder what she found so interesting about those lines that she highlighted them, and not the ones that stood out to me.
20070524
meditations on a used book
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2 comments:
its funny how some things mean something to other people;but go unnoticed by others. maybe she was trying to tell you something?
I checked out a book from the library, and half of the text was underlined in wobbly pencil that traversed the leading like it was drawn there by a distracted ant.
Pissed me right off. But at the same time, that's what's nice about a book, isn't it? You can't look at a webpage and wonder why someone else dog-eared it or why they thought "all of these fields are optional" was worth underlining.
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