Monday post for last Friday as I took some time off and never got around to being on a computer for the five day weekend.

We are awash in books. We have more of them than ever before—ebooks have allowed an explosion of publishing. We’re reading books on phones, tablets, e-readers, and print book sales are going back up. For most of the recent past, books have been a stand-in for civilization.

(There’s a lot of baggage carried with that idea. I want to ensure that no one misconstrues this with the sort of fashionable Western chauvinism overtaking much of the internet. This entry is about the book and its place in my life personally. The luggage has teeth, but I’ll be Rincewind.)

I was raised to respect books above all else. My grandfather had a basement filled to the brim with bookshelves and read voraciously. Once I was taking books out from the library solo, the idea was reinforced: take care of the books, don’t mark them, and ensure they are brought back as pristine as when you got them.

Following this rule led me to a failing grade in an Advanced English class. My freshman year of high school, I was in a class where I had to do Active Reading for the first time. The idea that I would mark up books with highlighters and write in the margin was absolutely anathema. I didn’t mind waxing poetic about every book I read, as an anyone who reads this site can tell, but I drew the line at writing in books.

Now adult me, as probably the adults in my life at the time should have, figured out that post—its get you the best of both worlds. You can mark up your books without wrecking them. In my many attempts at college, including the final one that stuck, I did eventually succumb to highlighter disease though that was with the same enthusiasm as most college freshman spending more time highlighting than reading deeply.

My relationship with marginalia and highlights changed when I started reading on a tablet. I could grab passages I liked and keep them for later, or I could respond to something in the text directly. Though forays into Twitter and Wikipedia holes derailed my reading, I had a lot more ideas of what I liked about books when I finished them.

I’m in the middle of a return to paper books. Part of this is that I would always prefer a paper copy to keep on the self, and got sick of paying for books twice. Also, as I do more work on my tablet, reading on it was losing a bit of its leisure aspect. Distraction being a click away didn’t help matters.

I am not going to swear off digital books, nor am I encouraging you to either. I am actively thinking about the way that the medium defines my interaction with it. I doubt it will stick, as I miss being able to always have a book with me, and having the same book on my phone and tablet makes that exceedingly easy. I’m merely interested in the idea that reading on paper books increases my reading speed and engagement with a book.

I will say that writing out highlighted quotes gives me a different sense of the way writers shape their sentences. Where dependent clauses, commas, semicolons, and em dashes come together and make an author’s voice. When you’re actually feeling the shape of the sentence as you write it, you’re not in the author’s head but you at least can feel how the thoughts formed on the page. I now get why Hunter S. Thompson was obsessed with typing out The Great Gatsby when he had writer’s block.

If anyone follows me from back in the Macgasm days this article’s header image was the original I used to create the older Weekly Readers header.