You should read Dostoyevsky's The Idiot

Quick: What's your all time top 5 favorite Dostoevsky novels? Here's mine:

1. The Brothers Karamazov
2. The Idiot
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Demons
5. The Gambler

But I don't really want to write about that. Instead, I want to write about a subject that is rather near to my heart: underlining. Now, as a study technique I am sure there are times when it can't be avoided. Still, there is a special kind of despair one feels after purchasing a perfectly good looking book (say, a hardback Modern Library edition of The Wind in the Willows or the second volume of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation) from a used bookshop only to discover upon further investigation that the innards have been marked up beyond recognition by highlightings, underlinings, and banal scribbled notes. It affects me more, perhaps, than the average reader because I am vain and neurotic, and I begin imagining that upon my death whoever inherits my library will suspect that I was the one who wrote those aforementioned banal scribblings and went about playing fast and loose with yellow highlighters.

I experienced this feeling with particular force several years back when I bought a 2 dollar paperback of The Idiot [1]. There is an interesting scene early on in the novel where some of the characters (trying, I believe, to impress their female host) play a game where they each tell a story of how they have behaved shamelessly. The first two, the more sophisticated gentleman, give accounts where they are ostensibly shameful but in fact the stories are meant to disguised self-praise. The third, a depraved young man, tells his story straightforwardly and artlessly and he certainly behaved shamefully. None of them come off very well. Anyway, the previous owner of my book had written in the margin:

Note: All of the 'shameful"[sic] stories are ones in which the teller went unpunished.

I mean, that's not even germane. So, if you happen to inherit my library, please know that I didn't write that.

Now, please go read The Idiot. It's a really a great novel no matter what is written in the margins.[2]

[1] The Signet Classic edition, translated by Henry and Olga Carlisle.

[2] But be warned: when I originally read it years ago, it had such a traumatic affect on me that it cause me to be depressed for a week after I finished. But don't worry, I'm ok now.