My granddaughter, Cynthia, started a conversation on Facebook about sticky notes. She said she uses them to mark places in books where there were interesting or meaningful passages. I am a person who will write in books so I often buy a book just because I think I foresee lots of meaningful words.
I have shelves of such books in the case behind me. Some of them I never really found much worth remembering but the title fooled me and I got suckered into spending hard earned bucks. Some I underlined practically the whole book and wrote in the margins of page after page. These I should just throw in the box where I put my old journals.
I once borrowed a book from a friend and did the sticky note thing like Cynthia suggests. By the time I was finished with it, I had just about ruined the binding from stuffing in so many sticky notes. I removed them and returned the book. I never really used the notes and after a year or so of seeing the green pile on may desk, threw them away. I more recently borrow a book in which I very lightly penciled in the margins. I had to erase all the little pencil marks before I gave it back to my friend even though he told me I didn’t have to do that. But one should return a borrowed thing in as good as condition as when it was borrowed, right? It is too bad for my other friend that I don’t know how to rebind books.
I got a book from the library the other day: The Jesus Discovery. It is a book about archeological digs around Jerusalem. I thought it would be dry stuff, but the author has a way of writing that isn’t text-bookie. I won’t be writing in it, but I think maybe some sticky notes would be in order. If I find myself putting too many little stickies between the pages, maybe it means I should invest in a second hand copy that I can keep.
I know this is meandering, but sometimes I learn about an idea that is so obviously a sensible one, that I wonder why I didn’t think of for the first 68 years of my life. Anyone who thinks they ever come to a place when they know all the answers is a lunatic.
It might interest you to know that those sticky notes that we have all come to love were actually an ingenious recovery after someone invented a glue that didn’t quite make it. I take encouragement in that today.