All Quiet on the Western Front

While going through a lot of my old piles of boxes lately, I have found many books from the earliest classes of my college days. Being the incredible, lazy packrat that I am, I never did sell most of my books back to gain a little extra money. So there they sat, in storage, for quite a few years.

I decided to keep a few of the books that I found in those boxes. I dusted them off and put them on the newly-built bookshelf that now sits in my living room. These books include a variety of things, including a textbook about offset lithography and a few college classroom staples of literature.

I pulled the book All Quiet on the Western Front off of the shelf a couple of days ago. This is a very famous book about WWI, but if by chance you've never heard of it, a simple Google search will probably explain the plot to you much better than I can. Summaries have never been something I'm good at.

Since it has been quite a few years since I read through this book, I had forgotten in that time that I had purchased a used copy. The previous owner of this book somehow found it helpful to highlight a vast portion of the book, the specific reasons of which are lost on me. Being the proud owner of several used textbooks, this is not a new thing to me. What sets this particular book apart from those other hand-me-downs is the presence of hand-written comments and notes in the margins of the pages. These notes also fail to indicate any purpose.

What they do show, however, is that the previous owner of this book has some major issues in spelling.

Now, I could insert some ranting and raving about the fact a college student seems to have trouble with simple spelling and how incredibly disappointing that is, but honestly, who is surprised about that kind of thing anymore?

Since I am re-reading this book for the literary story and not for the need to write a paper or take a test, these notes serve no purpose to me other than to distract me from the plot. It takes an enormous amount of willpower to overlook these scrawled indications of...something. I will probably have to re-read the book to catch the details I missed when my train of thought was sharply misdirected onto a completely different track. Such as the desire to share this completely useless information.

Or maybe I should go buy a new copy. And maybe my own set of highlighters.