do you ... underline?

v rarely but sometimes

almost never? dunno how to vote. since i never read actual books for work purposes i never have the need, but i occasionally want to remind myself where choice quotes are in things i'm reading.

no, but i sometimes make a note of page nos etc on the inside covers, if it's a bk i might want to write about

i'll underline & annotate journal articles but usually not books

Yes. I underline in books, highlight papers. I also transcribe quotes separately, in fact I do this for every quote I may possibly ever want to use in the future, which is a right pain in the arse but does seem to help my scatter-brain. I try not to write annotations in-book because every time I come across something I've scrawled in the past it is painfully embarrassing.

Sometimes, if they're my own books. I just hate the sight of a library book in which whole blocks of text are covered in horizontal lines. If you must depreciate university property, better to use a vertical line in the margin.

Don't underline, though I had a brief phase of it once. Marginal notes v rarely (emil.y otm re: embarrassment). I copy quotes into a notebook too.

Just got iPad mini though, and am using Kindle app on that - enjoying highlighting there, and sort of love that there's an automatic page that pulls everything I've highlit together. Really lazy quote collecting.

I underline only quotes and words to look up/translate. I also scribble marginalia.

Used to underline, and have always intended to start a notebook for quotes, but I am lazy.

I underline, highlight, write in the margins, cross-reference, fold pages, and, generally, ruin my books. Unless it is one I (am re-reading and) want to keep in good condition.

There was a time when I would add quotes to Wikiquote pages, because I felt everyone needed to read them. I always feel there are so many good quotes missing from those pages.

i will underline papers but never books

i used to underlin in books with pencil but it made me feel like rebuying all my books just to not have underlining in them

no, don't underline, mainly because I'm crap and wobbly at it, looks like i'm trying to cross stuff out. will scribble marginal notes, these are quite often rude words about bits i disagree with rather than anything i actually want to refer to, which will normally go in a notebook, and I'm currently in the process of transcribing the notebooks to computer. like woof, love the fact I can pull kindle highlights into file, making them searchable, this is AMAZING. Can do without different colour highlighters in 2nd hand Arden Shakespeares tbh.

Occasionally fill a title page or any blank areas with longer screeds if nothing else to hand. Less common now with phone.

my drunken title page rambles have come back to haunt me more than once

like dreams, moments of damascene enlightenment and daredevil leaps of thought look like dull pebbles the next day. Dull pebbles ade absurd by excitable arrows, exclamation marks and the words THUS, or THEREFORE.

ade mabsurd.

An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Briefly, no.

Voting no- tried once for a while but was embarrassed later.

all the time

my ex used to tease me about making pencil notes in the margins of nonfiction books. for a while when i was in college every time i'd read an interesting book i'd go 'hmm, maybe someday i should write about this!'

can't imagine doing this in a novel, it seems so wrong.

No, never, at least not since I finished school (and even then I did it lightly in pencil). I hate writing in books. It just feels wrong.

Like woof, I have been using the highlighting function on e-books quite a bit, though.

There's a great bit in Pnin about somebody writing some nonsense in a library book that I never tire of quoting

Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as ‘Description of nature’, or ‘Irony’; and in a pretty edition of Mallarmé’s poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it ‘birds’.

When I'm in a funk, a Daniel Pinkwater compendium is a good cure, the 4 Novels or 5 Novels ones. There was one time probably 10 years ago, I powered through both and all the funny parts were little breaths of life. I started underlining everything that made me cackle with laughter. I read them again recently and all these many, many sentences I underlined struck me as pretty subtle. For example, from a random page in Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars, I underlined a psychiatrist telling the main character, "You must be full of aggression. That's a good sign." Or, less acontextually, on the same page: "Just them an exterminator's truck came past. DR. KILZUM, it said on the side of the truck, ALL HIS PATIENTS DIE." So to have all these underlines, very few of which I laughed at as I reread them last month, shows me that either I laughed a lot more easily then (doubtful) or that I was laughing at anything about death or aggression or adult buffoonery. It was like a palimpsest to myself that things are better now.

can't imagine doing this in a novel, it seems so wrong.

i did it in a novel recently, it was weird

i put brackets around things

innovator, leader, toyota champion 2007

i do the brackets thing too, but only wwen ive printed something out and its printer paper and i can get coffee on it too and maybe jelly and it doesnt matter

i have a variety of bracketing devices

oh hell no. xeroxes i'll put vertical lines on. books get copious amounts of stickies, or if i'm out of those, torn up bits of receipts, gum wrappers, ticket stubs, etc.

while i was in college i think i did

when i was in college i underlined a lot of library books. in ink.

i greatly regret this.

now we're getting to the bottom of things...

i make boxes around very important things.

btw, there is nothing worse - nothing - than discovering a nice cheap penguin classic in a charity bookshop only to find that the interiors have been heavily marked up with pen and highlighter

otm, i like having Arden editions of Shakespeare plays & am pained when I see a 2nd-hand one cheap & the first couple of acts are disfigured by bright yellow highlighting, underlining & the usual notes - 'IRONY', 'USE OF ALLIT' 'NATURE UPSET', etc

lol

Once tried to underline using biro Important passages in a Serious and Worthy book (non fiction) whilst on a train, the embarrassing thought of those terrible wobbly lines has prevented me ever since from either opening or getting rid of said book, or underlining anything ever again.

no, but i sometimes make a note of page nos etc on the inside covers, if it's a bk i might want to write about

^^^ a relic from my student days that is invaluable, with one correction: I still underline sentences and paragraphs I love and make a note of those too.

As I've gotten older I regard books in pristine condition suspiciously.

There's a difference between a book looking read and one that's been coloured in.

oh yeah highlighting looks gross

Underlining, yes. Highlighting, no.

A 21st century twist I've recently performed: photographing a passage of a book with my iPhone (it was a library book).

i'm starting a milton collection and whoever owned it before me was just an awful human being - vertical lines, underlines, notes in the margins, writing OVER THE WORDS THEMSELVES, literally coloring entire pages with crayon...

bloodstains, entire pages ripped out, burn marks, receipts for tanning salon visits stuck between pages, nail clippings, and one page a solitary daisy from Lord knows when, pressed as flat and lifeless as a butterfly in a lepidopterist's display case.

the person also annotated the FRONT COVER

wtf

Clealry more than a garden variety eccentric, this person was raving mad.

Hannibal Lecter as conceived by Vladimir Nabokov

Sorry, should have just said A+ or something.

my fiction is clean, but as an academic of sorts my academic books are underlined copiously. so much underlining that i'm never really sure why i'm doing it, it's kinda just what i do when i'm doing academic reading. i wish i could do it more neatly, i find a crisp underline pleasing to the eye, a wobbly one abominable. here is some underlining i did while 1. on the tube, 2. standing, 3. drunk:

http://oi50.tinypic.com/2mx4lyg.jpg

i'm a savage.

get a handle on yourself, man!!

yellow card

ha ha, that's amazing. *turns to neighbour on tube, shoves book under face, points significantly at underlining*.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

yeah same, won't do it with fiction or most non-medical non-fiction but academic stuff (printed out) yes

i underline like crazy, it's a compulsion. at this point, if i'm not underlining things i don't feel like i am really "processing" the text as thoroughly as i should. so i guess it's not about marking stuff to return to as much as it is just a way to make sure i am reading "actively"... not drifting off.

That's how I ead boring legal stuff. Our office is pretty paperless but I buck the trend by printing out stuff I really need to read (as opposed to skim for salient points of law) so I can write all over it.

bloodstains, entire pages ripped out, burn marks, receipts for tanning salon visits stuck between pages, nail clippings, and one page a solitary daisy from Lord knows when, pressed as flat and lifeless as a butterfly in a lepidopterist's display case.

Satan's influence imo

most disgusting savagery

the one thing about underlining is i don't usually enjoy dipping back into a book filled with (sometimes embarrassing) notes from years ago. i had to buy a new copy of ulysses to solve this issue.

you just need to try not to embarrass yourself, it's good discipline

Hard to avoid though. Have you read any of your old ilx posts recently?

only every day

And you have yet to find anything to make you cringe? On that case you win some kind of award

when i annotate books i am writing for eternity

but here i am writing for you alone, here in this moment we share

so i can blame any defects on your involvement thank god

Ha, I've always wanted to be someone who writes notes when reading fiction, but I'm way too self-conscious so just about the only times I do is when I look up an unfamiliar word or reference. I occasionally regret what a poor reader I am and fantasize about starting my own little scribbly cargo cult in the margins. There's a very rare occasion when I recognize an interesting or funny parallel with something else I've just read and want to note it in case I ever return to the book. Two years later I'll open a book and see "DICKENS! Haw!" above some line about avocados and wonder what the hell I'm on about.

I like it when people star or rate their favorite stories in the table of contents of short story collections.

I use ILB for my marginalia.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Savages.

The mad stories. Oh Delmore I was so young. I believed so much. You were the greatest man I ever met. You could capture the deepest emotions in the simplest language. We gathered around you as you read Finnegans Wake. So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were a few things better than to devote one's life to Joyce. You'd annotated every word in the novels you kept from the library. Every word.

i like how the yeses seem to have been far more vocal than the nos about it

Well of course.