If you take out a lot of books from the library you inevitably discover something about those who have come before you.
Sometimes they leave their library slips in the books; so you can see what else they're reading. Often, the books they take out are similar - two or three mysteries; or several books about Italian cooking. Often they're eclectic - a science fiction novel and a biography of a politician. Usually, the only book you have in common with them is the one in which you found the slip.
Sometimes they leave bookmarks. No great loss for them; no great gane for yourself considering the glut of bookmarks that have been manufactured and sold or more often given away.
But mostly, they leave a more permanent record - by marking up the book itself. Often it's annoying. There are people who take it upon themselves to correct the author's grammar. It would be bad enough, but usually it's made worse because the anonymous proofreader is wrong - the author's grammar was perfectly correct in the first place and now your concentration has been spoiled - and the willing suspension of disbelief that gets you absorbed in the story has been shattered by this clumsy intrusion from the metaworld.
Then there are the students. They're easy to tell because of the entire paragraphs and pages that are underlined or highlighted; or the words scribbled in the margins such as "character revelation?" or "foreboding" or "dramatic tension" and the like. Again, somewhat distracting, though you do get some enjoyment out of speculating on what the essay question was that the student was trying to answer and what the student is like.
But what I find most intriguing is when people underline words that they are unsure of. It's interesting to see which words give people trouble -- and which ones don't.
I just finished reading Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, to which I had been led through reading Michael Palin's Hemingway's Chair, a novel about a man obsessed with Earnet Hemingway. Reading Palin's book made me recall that I had never read any Hemingway. So off I went to the Joe Fortes branch of the Vancouver Library to see what Hemingway they had on the shelves. Hence, For Whom the Bell Tolls. A great book by the way. Hemingway's style has been derided as simplistic, but I found the language very powerful and imaginative. His cadence, his sparing use of adjectives, his way of evoking a scene through a few well-chosen words show that he was one of the greatest writers in the English language.
To get back to the main point. Starting near the end of the book, Chapter 36, I began to notice words circled or underlined in a tentative pencil. Words like fornicating. (As an aside, one of the problems with the book, besides the inherent sexism, is the distracting use of euphemisms for obscenities; e.g., "I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness". I suppose both can be blamed on the fact that the book was published in 1940.)
The next word underlined was coreligionary. Understandable. But the one after that was content. Then cherish. Followed by oversensitized. Very strange; yes, some of the words might have been difficult, but "content", "cherish"?
Then the answer hit me. Vancouver is home to many ESL schools, catering to young Asian students, who come here for a year to learn English before returning to Korea and Japan to continue their education. Obviously, this chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls had been assigned to a class for a reading comprehension lesson. "Content" was no longer a puzzle; after all, it can have completely different meanings depending on the context.
I now had a better idea of the mysterious person who saw fit to highlight owlishly, accentuate, and intriguers. I wonder where she or he is now, and whether they've read any more Hemingway. I certainly haven't read any Japanese or Korean writers - even in translation.
Posted by wetcoast at September 5, 2003 10:22 PM