Highlighter

Freshman year of high school, my literature teacher gave us pop highlighter quizzes. We would trade books with the person sitting next to us, then she would read aloud the passages from the previous night’s reading that we should have deemed important enough to highlight. Points for deducted for every such passage you had missed.

One day, Ben forgot his book and asked to borrow mine for his literature block, which was earlier in the day than mine. It was a pop highlighter quiz day, and the person grading “Ben’s” book highlighted all the important passages I had missed. When I took the quiz later in the afternoon, and the teacher asked whose partner had scored a 100%, the student sitting next to me was the only one who raised his hand. I’m thirty-eight years old, and the memory still brings me shame. 

When you read a book on a Kindle, you have the option of turning on or off the Popular Highlights function. When turned on, the Kindle will show you which passages have been highlighted most often by people reading the same book on their own devices all over the world. It creates a sense of community and camaraderie within an otherwise solitary activity. This sentence that you found to be so powerful? 3,876 other people noted it as well. Maybe the idea impacted them the same way it did you. I turn that function off. I think most people are wrong. 

There are highlighter books, and there are nonhighlighter books, and you might not know which kind of book you’re holding until you start reading. Last year, while reading on the beach, I realized that the new novel I had bought for that trip was, in fact, a highlighter book. I called my dad and asked him to find a highlighter somewhere in the condo and bring it out to me. I’m not a spoiled person, and I don’t like asking people to do favors for me, but the book wouldn’t let me turn the page until it had been annotated appropriately. Now I keep a highlighter in every bag, to be prepared for future such emergencies.

Sometimes I give away books after I read them, to friends or family or coworkers, or I drop them in the Little Free Library by my apartment building. I cringe as I hand over a book that I’ve highlighted, as if the sentences that resonated with me reveal something about myself I might not otherwise be willing to share. I worry that their eyes will drift to the highlighted pieces before they’re supposed to, dulling the impact, like closed captions for a sitcom giving away the punchline a beat too early.

There’s no real reason for the highlighter anymore. No one is looking over my adult shoulder making sure I’m deeming the correct ideas to be important. But the urge is still there, to honor the words and sentences and paragraphs that rewire my brain. To do so in a way that is physical, tangible, irreversible. To show the text that it’s done its job well. If I ever write a book, I hope you’ll read it with a highlighter.