Somebody at work saw me underlining in a paperback during lunch and asked, genuinely curious, why I don’t just use the little flag tabs, since I clearly read enough to justify owning a pack. I didn’t have a good answer in the moment, said something about liking the mess of it, and then spent an embarrassing amount of my actual work day, matching billing codes instead of thinking about books, turning the question over.

Here’s what I think it actually is. A flag marks a place. A pencil mark records a reaction, in real time, at the exact moment I had it, and there’s a difference between those two things that flags can’t give me. When I go back through my copy of Gormenghast, the margins aren’t just “important passage here,” they’re half-formed thoughts, a question mark next to a line I didn’t trust yet, an actual little argument with myself in the white space next to a paragraph about the Duchess’s cats that I apparently found funnier on a second pass than a first. A flag would tell future me where to look. The pencil tells future me what past me was actually thinking, badly spelled and abbreviated as it usually is.

It’s slower, I won’t pretend otherwise. Flags are objectively more efficient if the goal is speed, and there are days, especially after a long shift matching codes to chart notes all day, when the last thing I want is one more task requiring a decision, even a small one like whether this line is underline-worthy. But reading fast was never actually the goal for me the way it clearly is for Priya, who tears through books at a pace I can’t match and does, in fact, use flags, because for her the point is coverage, getting through the stack.

I found a used copy of Gormenghast at my usual bookstore with someone else’s pencil marks already in it, mostly in the descriptive passages, and I’ve never been able to erase them even though they’re not mine. Reading that copy felt like reading alongside a stranger’s earlier reaction, which is, now that I’ve actually written this down, probably the real reason I keep doing this to my own books too. I like the idea that some future reader, maybe nobody, maybe just me in five years, gets to see what I actually thought, not just where I thought it mattered enough to stop.