I was going to write a review of The Aeneid for Goodreads, but it would get rejected eventually since it’s not about the book itself but just a few lines about my copy’s previous owners. Reviews are highly patrolled there, more so than on Amazon, so it’s bringing owls to Athens to post this there.
Whole chapters, with perhaps one or two lines excepted, are entirely highlighted. It took some time and concentration for me to not be distracted, not necessarily from the yellow highlighting ink, but from trying to figure out what kind of frame of mind one would have to be in to bother doing something like that.
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I’ve picked up some used books with marvelous marginalia. Sometimes, when entire passages are highlighted, it seems to me to be the hand of an overzealous undergrad. But some marginalia (line notes, rather than just highlighting) are so obscure I can only imagine they are a personal mind’s weird interactions with the text. I had a dream once, in which I was in a solitary confinement prison and was able to use the prison library alone, and could interact with other prisoners only through marginalia. I almost wrote a book about it, but never got around to it.
Now that would be an interesting story idea. Let us know if you ever pursue it, Jill.
Yeah…you should definitely pursue that idea.