Reading a Book in Unexpected Company

I’m in the middle of one of the better books I’ve read this year. I didn’t realize this immediately when I began to read it but I’m not reading this book alone. I’m reading it with my mother. My mother who died a little over a year ago.

I’d completely forgotten it was one of the books I’d grabbed from her shelves as we completed the sad task of clearing out her home. It could just as easily have been a book I plucked from a Little Free Library or a used book sale. With that in mind, I felt a little annoyed when early on I noticed little notes here and there, words circled, and an array of scribbles in the book’s margins. Annoying, I thought. I don’t need some stranger’s input affecting my reading experience! And then it hit me. I know that handwriting! It was the hand that wrote lists of all kinds, on hand-torn pieces of scratch paper spread on every surface in her home. It was the hand that wrote on the front (the front!) of photos identifying the people in the photos. The hand that wrote all over articles she’d tear from magazines and send regularly through the mail—pencil and highlighter here—lest the recipient (me, mostly) should fail to glean the “right” bits. Of course, it was no surprise then that that hand also marked up the (many, many) books she read.

And, boy, did that woman read books. She insisted she didn’t begin to read until late in life after she retired. And that she read slowly. But if she lost anything in speed, she made up for it in her tenaciousness and by the sheer number of books she read. Even in her last year of life—her 96th year—she was an active member of two monthly book clubs. Not fluffy, light books, mind you, but complex books, both fiction and nonfiction, according to her descriptions. All in addition to her other reading, i.e., The New Yorker for years, replaced more recently by The Week, when all her book club reading likely took up too much of her time, preventing her from getting through a full edition of The New Yorker each week. She was also one of those final few to have never read an online word. Not one. All of the words she read she held in her hands, words on paper pages she turned with those hands that so loved to mark things up.

Throughout this book, I’ve come across a variety of markings on the outer page margins. There’s this type:

And this type:

Slightly different, right? What is the meaning of one, that’s slightly different than the meaning of the other?

And then at times, I’ll find the faintest line under a word or a phrase. Was that deliberate? What was she thinking there? Or was her pencil absentmindedly at times simply moving her eye along?

Then there are the circled words, almost certainly deliberate, but not always clear in their meaning or relevance.

She often jotted the characters’ names and other details somewhere, as they appeared in the storyline. Sometimes it would be on a scrap of paper she used as a bookmark. Sometimes, as in this book, on the inside of the jacket, it’s barely legible.

Sadly, the names and notes as written, as hard as I tried, made sense only in her reading of the story. No help to me. The one below, particularly, isn’t going to help anyone navigate this story; she must have mixed herself up with this one.

But, oh, how I’d love to ask her about every note and scribble.

I don’t want to make too much of it but the whole thing has felt a little “otherworldly.” And as compelling as I’m finding the book, a part of me wants to linger in the story for as long as possible, to keep turning through the pages we’re sharing so unexpectedly. I’m gazing over at my bookshelf right now, not sure, but hoping I grabbed another book or two that day. I’d greedily soak up another journey through a marked-up, page-corners-folded, notated in her one-of-a-kind scribbles story with her.

Finally, when I look at the list of books I read this year, I see it averages out randomly to two books per month. I choose to believe she played a hand in that.