Marginalia in practice: rereading as discovery
The second reading of a book is a different book, not because the words have changed but because you have.
You bring different knowledge to the first page. You know how it ends. You know which characters will matter. You know which early image will return later carrying more weight than it first seemed.
And you bring something else: your annotations from the first reading.
The pencil marks, the questions, the arguments you left in the margins. Rereading with those marks already there is not the same as rereading a clean copy. It’s reading a dialogue.
Why second readings differ
I often return to The Things They Carried because it keeps changing with each rereading.
The first time I read The Things They Carried, I understood it as a war book. I followed the narrative and the stories accumulated. The soldiers became real to me: their weight, their superstitions, the things they carried both literally and otherwise.
The second time, I read my own annotations alongside Tim O’Brien’s text.
What I found was that I had been arguing with the book in ways I barely registered the first time. I had marked passages in which O’Brien interrogates the nature of truth, saying that a true war story is never moral, that its truth is absolute and uncompromising.
Besides several of those passages, I had written:
But he’s making a moral argument right now.
I had noticed a contradiction and let it pass.
The annotation made me go back and stay with it, which, I think, is the main thing rereading with your own notes teaches you: what you let pass the first time.
Questions you forgot you asked
There is a particular kind of annotation that only reveals itself on rereading: the question you answered without knowing it.
You write why? in the margin of page 12.
By page 200, the book has answered the question so thoroughly that you forgot you asked. But the pencil mark is still there on page 12.
Going back to it and then reading forward from the question to the answer the book provides is a completely different experience from simply receiving the answer as it arrives.
You’re tracking the book’s argument, not just following its story.
I’ve started doing this deliberately.
Before I reread anything, I review my first-reading annotations and note the questions I left unanswered. Not the observations. Not the agreements. Not the passages I marked for language.
The questions.
Then I read, looking for the answers, and I note in a different-colored pen where I used pencil or pen when I find them.
Or when I don’t.
Sometimes a book doesn’t answer its own questions, and knowing that is part of understanding what the book actually is.
Errors worth keeping
Rereading also reveals the annotations you made in error.
There are marks in my copy of The Things They Carried that I made during the first reading and can no longer interpret.
A check mark beside a passage that seems unremarkable now. A question the book answers so obviously that I can’t understand why I found it open. A word circled—weight—with no note, and now I’m not sure what I meant by it.
These failed annotations are evidence of what I didn’t yet know.
That check mark beside the ordinary passage may mean I was comparing it to something I had read the week before, a context I no longer have. The circled word may come from an earlier stage of the reading, before I understood how O’Brien was using it.
The annotations are dated not by calendar date but by the name of the reader who made them.
Which means the errors are part of the record, too.
What rereading reveals
The most useful thing rereading reveals is the difference between what the book is doing and what you thought it was doing.
I thought The Things They Carried was primarily a book about soldiers.
The second reading clarified that it’s primarily a book about the act of telling: whether stories can carry truth, what happens to truth when it’s told and retold, and the relationship between the person who experienced something and the person who writes about it.
The soldiers matter.
But the argument about storytelling is what the book is built around.
My first-reading annotations were almost entirely about the soldiers.
My second-reading annotations were almost entirely about the argument.
The difference tells me something about what I received the first time.
That gap between readings is where the discovery is. The text doesn’t change. The reader does, and the annotations make that visible.
A note on tools
A practical note on color and tools: I use a pencil for first readings and a pen for second readings so I can distinguish them at a glance.
The pencil annotations are provisional: questions, uncertainties, first impressions.
The pen annotations are more considered.
When I look at a page and see both, I can see the conversation: who I was when I read it the first time, and who I was when I read it the second.
That layered record is what makes the annotated copy irreplaceable.
It’s a record of every encounter with the same text, each one visible.
Each encounter is different.
Each one is visible.
Final thought
Rereading is one of the few ways to watch your own mind change on the page.
The text stays where it was. Your earlier notes stay where you left them.
What moves is your understanding.
Where to go next
If you’d like to begin with the first markings and method, start with Marginalia in Practice: How to Annotate Books.
If you’re interested in what kinds of notes remain useful years later, continue with Marginalia in Practice: Notes that last.
If you’d like the larger philosophy behind this habit, read On rereading, marginalia, and a lifelong reading practice.
And for more essays on attention, memory, and reading habits, visit The Reading Life.
Frequently asked questions
Because the second reading often reveals structure, argument, and pattern that the first reading could only experience moment by moment.
Yes, especially if you want to track how your interpretation changes. A second set of notes often argues with the first.
That can be useful too. Rereading often shows what remained and what disappeared.
Absolutely. Complex novels, layered memoirs, and books built on structure or voice often deepen dramatically on a second reading.
