Marginalia in practice: notes that last
Most reading notes disappear. The useful ones usually stay attached to the moment that made them.
Not immediately.
They sit in notebooks, on index cards, or in apps on your phone, and for a while, they feel permanent. Then the notebook fills, and you start another. The cards slide into a drawer. The app is replaced by another app.
The notes from five years ago might as well have been written in another language. You can read the words, but the context that made them meaningful has evaporated.
You wrote, ” See also Didion on grief”, and now you don’t remember what that was supposed to connect to.
Marginalia doesn’t disappear the same way.
The note in the margin of a book is attached to the sentence that produced it. The context is right there.
You can’t lose the note without losing the book, and a book is harder to lose than a notebook. It has weight. It takes up space. It keeps insisting on itself.
This is the first reason marginalia lasts: it lives where it belongs.
Why margins preserve notes
The second reason is more useful: marginalia forces you to be brief.
A margin is narrow. A notebook gives you a full page. The margin of a paperback gives you perhaps an inch.
That constraint is productive.
It requires you to compress the observation to its essential form. You can’t write three sentences when you have room for five words.
So you write the five words.
The actual observation, stripped of hedging, context-setting, and the familiar “what I mean by this” that fills many notebooks.
The five words in the margin of The Things They Carried that read pain and boredom coexist here are more useful to me than three sentences in a notebook would have been.
The compression is the point.
It forced me to name the observation rather than circle it.
Most reading notes fail because they’re too long. They explain the observation instead of making it.
The margin doesn’t allow that.
It demands the thing itself.
What to move into a journal
There’s also the question of what to do with marginalia beyond the book.
I’ve kept a reading journal for years. Not a log of what I’ve read, but a place to extend the annotations that needed more room than the margin allowed.
When a marginal note opens into something larger, when the question I wrote in pencil turns out to be a question I want to sit with longer than a single rereading, I move it to the journal.
But I don’t copy the note.
I date it, write the book title and page number, and then write forward from the note rather than transcribing it.
Transcribing a note into a journal relocates it.
Writing forward from it, asking what the note was reaching toward, what it connects to, where it goes if you follow it, turns the marginal annotation into actual thinking.
The margin holds the moment. The journal is where I find out what it means.
Some annotations never need to leave the margin.
The check mark. The circled word. The truth is, there is a sentence that stopped me.
These are complete as they are.
They don’t need development.
They need to stay where they were made, attached to the sentence that earned them.
Does annotation damage the book?
The question I’m asked most often about annotating is whether it damages the book.
My answer has changed over the years.
I used to be more protective. I kept separate notebooks, kept my books clean, and maintained the fiction that the books on my shelf were real objects, while reading was incidental.
I don’t believe that anymore.
The annotated copy of The Things They Carried on my shelf isn’t damaged.
It’s a used one.
Used in the way tools get used. Used in the way things that have done their work look different from things that haven’t.
The pencil marks are evidence of attention.
The pen marks are evidence of the conclusion.
Together, they’re evidence of separate encounters with the same text, which is more than a clean copy can show.
A clean book tells you what someone owns. What’s written in the margins tells you what they thought while they were reading it
What makes a note last
What makes a note last isn’t the medium or the system. The quality of attention behind it is what matters.
Notes that last are specific.
Not that I liked this, but the syntax breaks here, and the break is the meaning.
Not moving, but Kathleen’s name is withheld until this page. Why so long?
The more specific the annotation, the more it carries when you return to it.
The vaguer the annotation, the faster it fades into noise.
This is the practice the margin enforces.
The narrow margin doesn’t give you room to be vague.
It forces you to decide what you’re actually saying.
The notes that last are the ones you committed to.
Where you stopped drifting and said:
this.
here.
This is what I think happened on this page.
The margin is narrow on purpose.
Work inside it.
Where to go next
If you’re deciding how to begin, start with Marginalia in Practice: How to annotate books.
If you’re interested in what old notes reveal when you return to them, continue with Marginalia in Practice: Rereading as discovery.
If you’d like the wider philosophy behind this series, read On rereading, marginalia, and a lifelong reading practice.
And for more essays on attention, books, and reading habits, visit The Reading Life.
Frequently asked questions
The notes worth keeping are usually the most specific ones: observations about language, structure, contradiction, or a precise emotional response.
Both work. A notebook gives you more room; the margin keeps the note attached to what produced it. If you can only do one, write in the book. You can always copy a note out later. You can’t put it back in context once it’s gone.
Make fewer but better notes. Specific notes survive longer than large collections of vague ones.
Yes, if it helps you pay closer attention and gives you something meaningful to return to.
