I hate this. Of course it's your property, you do what you want with it. Do your own illustrations, annotate with abandon, get out the red pen for editing practise... But for me, I love nothing more than reading a book so big that I practically live in it.

I recently wanted to try one of Kató Lomb's [1][2] preferred language-learning methods: getting a book in a foreign language and reading it (and re-reading it), figuring out words and phrases as if it's a big puzzle and writing them in the margins. From her book "How I Learn Languages" (1970):

> I recommend buying your own books for language learning. They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to their essential core, and annotated so that they become a mirror of yourself.

> What shall you write in the margins? Only the forms and phrases you have understood and figured out from the context.

> Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a word is important, it will occur several times and explain itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the un- known. The more you read, the more phrases you will write in the margins. The relationship that develops between you and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little puzzle.

I can't really bring myself to write in the books themselves though, so I've been using separate paper. It feels wrong, even in a cheap book, like I'm defiling it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Kat%C3%B3+Lomb