I found myself wanting to read a physical book instead of one on my phone. From my shelf, I chose Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

I’d read the book years ago. (Not this particular copy. It’s probably a hardback from a school library.) For this current reading, I was less interested in the plot than in holding a book in my hands and turning the pages. Also, I wanted to immerse myself in Hemingway’s economical style, which is easier for me to do with type on paper than with pixels on a screen.

I came across a badly underlined phrase in the middle of Chapter Four. There was a time when underlining things in books was a common practice for me, but I did it carefully using a six-inch metal ruler to ensure my lines were neat and precise, worthy of the thought I was noting.

Whoever read this book before me was not at all precise. It looked like they had grabbed a pen with their non-dominant hand and not wanting to slow down more than a millisecond, made a squiggly line.

The underlined phrase was “he was one of us.”

A paragraph down, a whole sentence was given the wobbly treatment: “He’s one of us, though. Oh, quite. No doubt. One can always tell.”

I studied the two underlinings, trying to see what the other person saw.

Holding the book in my left hand, I used my thumb to flip through it from back to front, looking for more underlinings. There were plenty. I didn’t pause to read any, preferring to come upon them naturally and in sequence.

Either the previous reader was a student assigned to write a paper on Hemingway’s novel, or, like me, was naturally intrigued by style and character development. Not only were passages underlined, in some cases, entire paragraphs had a rectangle drawn around them. The importance of one was  noted by an asterisk, created by superimposing a plus sign over an X.

There were occasional bits of marginalia as well. Here are a few:

Besides a reference to one of the book’s characters, the person had written in quick, shaky caps, “Antihero— depends on others to support him.”

By the side of a long paragraph in which Jake walks towards a cathedral and thinks about his friends and himself, is written “Stream of Consciousness.”

In two places in Chapter 12, the person wrote “Pity and Irony.”

In Chapter 16, there are several pages of conversation between Brett and Jake, most of which is void of ‘she said’ and ‘he said.’ So not to lose track of which of them was saying what, my friend (by now I think of the earlier reader that way) put a B or a J at the end of each piece of the dialog.

As a result of this augmented reading of The Sun Also Rises, I have decided to read more physical books, underline passages that I like, do the markings freehand, and include marginalia. Thank you, my unknown friend.