My grandmother's copy of The Odyssey. Source: Nancy K. Napier With so much talk about loneliness, with causes ranging from the pandemic to social media, I've been reading and thinking about it more.

In bold, all-caps letters, the phrase shouts back at me. It’s printed on an otherwise empty page in the book cupped in my hands: “The Friend” by Sigrid Nunez. For a moment, it feels as though the ...

Readers on TikTok and Instagram are making the aesthetics of reading more visible than ever with creative, and often intricate, annotations. Called marginalia, these markups can be elaborate, with ...

It’s confession time; I’m an annotator (a person who adds explanatory or critical notes to a text) and often write in the margins of my own books to highlight passages I find challenging or that I ...

From a very early age I was taught not to write in books. Books, my father taught me, were nothing short of sacred, and were to be treated with respect. That meant no writing. The idea was later ...

“I feel marginalized.” That’s the phrase my recently retired, gently aging friend used when asked how he was doing. “Pushed aside” was what he meant — from his responsibilities in his business, now ...