The great debate

Caro cooper and deirdre fidge argue about good book etiquette.

MAKE IT YOUR OWN BY CARO COOPER

Lend me your ears, but never your books. Really, never your books. I am a dog-earer, an underliner, a messy eater. I will destroy your precious paperbacks. Reading a book takes forever and I simply can’t be clean for more than 10 minutes a day. What am I supposed to do, read the book in micro-instalments? To salvage my relationships with friends and family, I just buy my own reading material. A borrowed book is one that needs to be treated specially and read with museum archivist gloves on.

I often imagine that people who keep their books pristine also wrap their furniture in protective plastic, have boring sex with virgins and keep that hygiene gusset sticker in their swimwear. Just as I don’t understand how they can bear the couch plastic sticking to their sweaty thighs on a summer day, I also don’t get how they can relax with a book while keeping it neat and clean. I imagine part of their brain reads while the other half scans for mess hazards: dog approaching, beware drool; mother arriving, beware spilt tea; baby eating, beware everything. Even more baffling to me is why these people need to keep their books clean. What frightens them about something used or marked? There is so much joy in a much-thumbed book, and excitement in finding a secondhand novel with notes – it’s a gateway into another person’s mind. Worn books are warm and calming; pristine books are wooden planks.

I read while I eat. Eating and keeping pages clean are incompatible sports. Food or grease will inevitably end up on the pages. Embrace it! It’s a memento of a delicious meal and time spent enjoying good things. Eating and reading are two of life’s great, affordable joys – they belong together like puberty and crop tops.

If a word has more than two syllables, chances are I don’t know it. As it so happens, books are filled with words made up of heaps of letters and countless beats. Books are also filled with great lines, horrific lines, terrible quotes and brilliant ideas. If not for underlining and note-taking, how else would I remember all the things I’ve read? Of course, if I am going to underline something, I’ll also need to dog-ear the page. If not for dog-earing, I’d spend hours looking for just one sentence, only to find it wasn’t as profound as I’d once thought. Dog-earing and marking books saves time and lives (I reckon, anyway – like if the book was one on CPR or how to perform an emergency tracheotomy).

I take a book wherever I go, even places I know I won’t have a chance to read, just in case. As a result, my books get beaten and bent, lunchboxes leak on them, water bottles drip on them, uncapped pens scribble on them and that magical sand that always lines the seams of my bags (despite their never having been near a beach) gets all through the spine. But the damage is worth it for those times when the doctor is running late or the train gets stuck between stations for an hour, or I decide to cancel all appointments and hide out in a café reading my book (it happened once). You can’t have that if your books are too precious to travel.

There are a handful of books in the world that need to be kept pristine, and it will hurt you to hear this, but your copy of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections just isn’t one of them. So live a little, go on – break that spine, crease that corner and draw a penis on page 69.

HANDLE WITH CARE BY DEIRDRE FIDGE

A few months back, I spent an entire day organising my bookshelves. Like many people, I thought a task like this would change my life and somehow bring order to a chaotic world. Neither happened, but it gave me the joy of rediscovering old books.

A novel I read in high school had been buried on a bottom shelf. Story specifics escaped me, but as soon as I saw the cover I recalled the gripping, tense mood of the tale. Rereading books is a joy and can be self-reflective – characters you hated on first read suddenly elicit empathy; descriptions you found poetic now seem unnecessary. I was excited to take a second look… until I flipped it open.

Oversized asterisks and frantic underlines covered the pages. Looped, bubbly handwriting crowded the margins. There was so much neon highlighter that it looked like this novel had spent three days at a ’90s rave. My literature teacher had clearly introduced me to the word ‘juxtaposition’, given its frequency in the notes. As much as I craved a reread, the annotation distracted me far too much to get beyond the first page.

I felt ashamed. This was an extreme act on the spectrum of book disrespect – a very real spectrum that exists and should be adhered to. Smaller acts, like dog-earing a page or lightly underlining a word, may seem less significant but are still completely unacceptable. Do you even want this book to have a second life? Or do you treat all objects as single-use, disposable items and jump with glee when you see trash islands overflowing with landfill?

OK, a seabird probably isn’t going to be strangled by a ragged copy of Normal People, but it’s still heartbreaking. Some say a well-worn book is evidence of love; that the cracked spine and torn pages show the reader agonised over every word and truly lived and breathed alongside the characters. POOEY TO THAT. POOEY. A secondhand book that looks as good as new is absolutely no indication of the former owner’s interest. Messiness does not signify a reader’s passion or author’s talent. If I love something, I treat it well!

I take care of it. I respect it. I don’t finish a cup of coffee in a lovely porcelain mug, then shotput it towards the kitchen. So, why do we allow books to be manhandled in such a way?

Years ago, a friend borrowed a book from me, and on returning it, casually apologised for spilling coffee on it. I barely recognised the creased, stained pile of puffed-up paper she plopped on the table – both the book’s spine and our friendship were now in tatters. Sure, objects are just things, but you wouldn’t borrow a dress and return it with a broken zip. You wouldn’t borrow your partner’s car and bring it back with fresh scrapes up the side. OR MAYBE YOU WOULD; SOME OF YOU ARE VERY RECKLESS.

Admittedly, I do have a certain curiosity around finding clues to a secondhand book's previous owner: an underlined sentence (what’s the significance?), a name in the cover (I wonder what your middle name is, Mrs Colette P. Finnegan), or a grocery list tucked in the back (prunes and oat bran? Someone’s bowels need a shake-up!). But that fleeting, perverse joy is far outweighed by the frustration of attempting to read waterlogged chapters and text obstructed by inky notes to self. I don’t know what that word means either, Colette, but if you’ve gone to the trouble of fetching a pen, the least you can do is scribble it on a piece of paper to look up later. Go eat your prunes.