“One day, she went to the bookstore and bought ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ by Jane Austen, and as she started reading, she realized how much she wanted to remember about the book after she was finished. ‘It wasn’t as intense or as thorough as I do now,’ she said of her early annotations. ‘It was mostly just little quotes here and there, maybe a word I had never known before, a star next to it, or an idea that I was like, “Oh, I want to come back to that.”‘ Thompson began chronicling her annotations on Instagram and TikTok…. Thompson… recently finished reading and annotating ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ a book she said she was glad she read carefully. Annotating slows down her reading process, but the output is worth it…. Annotating feels a bit like homework — an assignment you give yourself that allows you to use special pens and highlighters, colored sticky notes and whatever squiggles and doodles you desire. Maybe it’s not scholarship in the traditional sense, but it’s studious, nonetheless.”

The first post ever on this blog was about marginalia, and for a day “Marginalia” was the name of the blog. And as for “‘Sense and Sensibility,’ by Jane Austen,” I can’t read that phrase without recalling this line from my all-time favorite movie, “My Dinner with André”: “I mean there must have been periods when in order to give people a strong or meaningful experience, you wouldn’t actually have to take them to Everest…. I mean, there was a time when you could have just, for instance, written — I don’t know — ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ by Jane Austen….“