Do You Write Your Name in Books? On Rereading Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”
The other day, while I was reading William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, I had an irresistible urge to write my name on the flyleaf. I hadn’t done that in years. At 12, I scribbled my name in Jane Eyre. I also wrote it in my Latin dictionary.
Then I broke the habit. Some years ago, I was irritated when a librarian wrote my name in a novel I’d lent her. It seemed impudent, because it wasn’t her book.
Perhaps I wrote my name in Vanity Fair because I was enjoying it less than I hoped. When I first read it at 17, I found Becky Sharp hilarious and Dobbins charming, but I was disappointed in the book. I was a Victorian novel nut, but I preferred Dickens’s pyrotechnics and Trollope’s plain style to Thackeray’s pointed wit and stylistic bibelots. In the introduction to the Penguin, John Carey compares Vanity Fair to War and Peace. I do not see the similarities.
I enjoyed Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and The Newcomes. So why does the clever, nimble prose of Vanity Fair not delight me?
I wrote my name in the book, so now I have to like it.
Do you write your name in books?
Share this:
Author: Kat
I am an avid reader. The book blog is the perfect forum for bookish musings.
Enjoy!
View all posts by Kat
5 thoughts on “Do You Write Your Name in Books? On Rereading Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair””
I write my name in books when I lend – or “lend” – them to people. I hope they will feel the same twinge of guilt that I feel when I see someone else’s name in a book I never got round to returning.
I don’t write my name in books, but once after reading a book on theatre (for a class) and making many notes and quoting from it extensively, I felt the inexplicable urge to trace a butterfly on the back :). I really shouldn’t have, because it was a library book.
I write my name in books when I lend – or “lend” – them to people. I hope they will feel the same twinge of guilt that I feel when I see someone else’s name in a book I never got round to returning.
Maybe the sight of my name in the book would be the charm that gets my book back!
I know what you mean about “lending.”
I don’t write my name in books, but once after reading a book on theatre (for a class) and making many notes and quoting from it extensively, I felt the inexplicable urge to trace a butterfly on the back :). I really shouldn’t have, because it was a library book.
Oops! Now I want to draw a butterfly on the endpage.
😀