I'm about a third

I'm about a third of the way through what is turning out to be a very good book on writing titled Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

I am clearly not the first person to have found her wisdom inspiring. It's clear as day in pencil marks throughout the entire fucking book. Brackets around interesting passages. Underlined sentences. Words in the margin. Entire notes on the page above. How could an aspiring writer--so inspired--pull a pencil out of his pocket and deface a library book? Who carries a pencil, but nothing to write ON? When you have a pencil, you have it for a purpose... you have your pencil sharpener... you should have your notebook as well. Who writes notes in pencil, but doesn't at least try and erase them before returning the book? Surely they could have at least made an attempt at that.

Then of course, are the sentences underlined in pen. They alternate with the ones in pencil, suggesting multiple underlining sessions.

Then, there are the few notes that HAVE been erased. This shows admittance of guilt, but also laziness, because of the hundred or so pages that are still marked up. Or maybe they were erased for fear of plagiarism? "This note is genius! I don't want any future readers of this library book to rip me off! I'll erase it from here and write it in this here other library book that has nothing to do with writing, where other writers won't see it and rip me off, but where I can still get to it."

Also, you'll see that I took that picture with the chunk of pages falling out for maximum comedy.