In praise of dog-eared pages: the joy, memories and gentle ghosts to be found in beloved books

‘I’ve been rereading lots of books lately. I saw She Said and wanted to revisit Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s original book. I decided to reread Fleishman is in Trouble before watching the series. I hadn’t picked up How To Do Nothing since it came out, and felt like I needed a refresher.

By then, the joy of rereading had set in, and I went scouring my bookshelves for more.

There have been worlds I want to be immersed in again; stories I remember deeply enjoying in a way I want to recapture; memoirs which hit me profoundly that I needed to sink back into. It has been a pleasure to revisit them.

But the thing I wasn’t expecting to love so much has been the dog ears I left behind the first time around. Every time I’ve picked up a book again, there is a gentle haunting of a previous version of myself and the pages I chose to mark.

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Mostly these unfolded dog ears were to save my place: a deep bend in the upper corner of the page, which some readers would chide me for vandalising. I wonder now about why I chose to stop reading at that point. They’re often at the beginning of new chapters, or in places where it makes natural sense to take a break – but other times there seems to be no rhyme nor reason.

I think of the past me figuring out how much longer she has: do I have the time to finish this chapter? Can I squeeze in a few more pages? Sometimes, it seems like I was interrupted, leaving off in the middle of a thought.

I notice the long gaps between folds, where I had time to really sit down with the book. I notice the small gaps, where I was clearly squeezing in reading where I could. The gaps between these dog-ears are longer at the beginning and end of the book; I started with time to get into it, and at the end was carried along by the story, trying desperately to not put it down until it was finished.

I notice the tentative folds, not nearly as defined as others, where I thought I was going to stop reading – but crammed in just that little bit more.

A big dog ear, perhaps reaching an inch down the page, saves my place. But a small fold, only a centimetre down, saves pages with lines I want to mark and remember. Where two of these lines come on reverse pages, I’ve saved these pages with an accordion fold, first bending forward and then back.

I haven’t marked up which sentences I wanted to save: there is no highlighting or pencil marks, just the small bend in the corner. When I reach these pages, then, it’s an act of discovery to find what it was that captured me so much: what was it about this page – and who I was when I read this page – that I wanted to save for later?

These saved pages are echoes of a previous version of me. How To Do Nothing was a different read when I was in precarious employment – and before I deleted Facebook. The first time I read Bella Mackie’s Jog On, a memoir about discovering running as a treatment for anxiety, I was a supremely anxious person who never ran; now I am a slightly less anxious person who runs several times a week. I find myself saving different lines when I’m rereading these books again.

Now lost in the joy of this haunting, I find myself picking up books not for a whole reread but just for the dog ears: the beautiful turns of phrase in Mrs Dalloway I saved only for myself; the paragraphs in Arifa Akbar’s Consumed I marked to share with my therapist.

Sometimes I find I haven’t made dog ears at all, but instead used makeshift bookmarks to save my place. I find a plane ticket between Adelaide and Melbourne in 2018 in one book; a brochure for the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 2015 season in another.

But this spate of revisiting books has made me fall in love with the scars of dog-ears past. I love the way the ghost of me lives on in these pages. The tactile proof I read these words, I saved these places, I was here – and now I’m here again.