I write in books. I underline things, I write notes, I write "lol" and "no" and "fuck off". Most annoyingly, I have a habit of putting exclamation marks in margins. Next to good things, yes, but also next to bad things, surprising things, phrases I like or dislike, contentions I find contentious, contrariness with which I concur.
Occasionally I find one of these exclamation marks years later, and struggle to identify what I was exclaiming at, or why.
I don't write in library books. However, I do enjoy finding a library book that somebody else has been writing in. Notes in the margin can be interesting, but what I really want is a system like my exclamation marks. Something unclear and unintuitive. A puzzle scribbled on the text. An invitation to undertake some speculative archaeology.
This Lewisham library system copy of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh had passed through at least one pair of hands before it got to mine. Probably two, for I found two different systems of scribbling. Somebody had been underlining whole sentences, such as "I can't point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation." To my eye, these look like lines for a review or a blog: plot-adjacent, short, self-contained. Most tellingly, the underlinings stop about 50 pages in. Got the quotes, now to get on and read the thing.
Meanwhile, somebody - and I'm pretty sure somebody else - had been circling single words. Here they all are, in the order in which they appear.
shuffle, slat, garish, aboveboard, scooching, conflating, abalone, squished, trite, loudmouthed, slovenly, swoon, rife, dachshund, status seeking, forays, foreshadowing, squelch, serapes, gimp, throes, gobs, slack, wafting up, sable, muskrat, ermine, skunk, possum
Read them all out at once in your best open mic voice, throw in a couple of dramatic pauses, call it a cut up poem. But I can't quite work out what the commonality is here. Words that that reader doesn't know and wants to look up? Maybe "serapes" or "abalone", but surely not "shuffle" or "slack" or "skunk". Words that the reader likes, on their own merits? Words that are fun to say? That’s definitely true.
Words that the reader thinks are odd, and particularly well chosen in their oddness? I lean towards this last option, at least for some of them. The silly ones, those that are a little childish. "Squished", "schooching", "squelch", "gimp", "gobs": they land on their sentence with a thick, wet, lovely splat. (Childish words for a childish narrator: our hero is a young woman living off her trust fund, trying to sleep forever, and searching for the right combination of branded medication that will take her to a restful oblivion. Of course she’d say "scooching".)
But perhaps, like my exclamation marks, what we have here is an all-purpose notation system. Each circled word is important for some reason, but that reason shifts in accordance with the whim of the reader. This word is funny. That word is unfamiliar. And that word is exactly correct.
That little collection of furry animals at the end is interesting. It's interesting because it's a very deliberate selection of half a list. Here is the full sentence, with the circled words in bold:
I counted furs: mink, chinchilla, sable, rabbit, muskrat, raccoon, ermine, skunk, possum.
Why "muskrat" but not "chinchilla"? "Skunk" but not "rabbit"? I'm no expert on furs or mammals, but I don't think this is a question of circling all the mustelids, or all the more uncommon animals to make into a coat. ("Sable" turns up in 'Santa Baby'; ermine in the House of Lords.) It was at this point that I decided that my previous reader, whoever they were, was having fun at my expense.
Maybe all the other circlings had had some point behind them, but this - carefully and maliciously random - could only be designed to mess around with future readers. Naturally, I responded in kind. I let the book fall open, circled whichever word looked best, and returned it to the library.