Notes on Reading

I have always noticed how people hold books. I started observing this unconsciously. I’ve seen people fold the corner of a page without a second thought. The gesture is instinctive, almost absent-minded. They do it mid-sentence, mid-feeling. The crease becomes a private marker of urgency: I will come back to this. There is something unapologetic about it. The book is not being worshipped; it is being used.

I’ve also seen the opposite. The careful insertion of a bookmark. The smoothing of a page before closing it. The quiet refusal to let the spine bend too far. These readers handle books as though they are preserving evidence. Their movements are controlled and precise. The object remains intact, symmetrical, composed.

And then some write in the margins. Not aggressively, but thoughtfully. Underlines in pencil. A question mark beside a claim. A date written softly at the top of a page. I once borrowed a book filled with annotations and found it strangely intimate—like overhearing someone think. In contrast, I know readers who would never allow ink to touch paper. For them, a book arrives complete; it is not a surface for dialogue but a structure to be respected and exited without alteration.

Watching all of this, I began to realise that these are not trivial habits. They reveal something about how we approach ideas—and perhaps how we approach everything else.

None of this feels accidental to me anymore.

I have caught myself changing over time. I used to dog-ear pages constantly. It felt efficient, almost instinctive. But now it makes me uncomfortable. I annotate instead—light pencil underlines, small notes—and I always use a bookmark. I’m not entirely sure when the shift happened. Perhaps I became more attentive to preservation. Perhaps I simply became more conscious of how I wanted to interact with what I read.

That is why I find this subject quietly compelling. A book, after all, survives both kinds of handeling and i don’t think there is a correct way to handle a book. But I do think the way we do it says something precise about us. And once you begin noticing, it is impossible to stop.

Sneha

-The English Book Depot