Dear Alyssa M.

Dear Alyssa M

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, so I’m going to keep this short; I bought your old copy of Lord of the Flies from a second-hand book store. Do you want to know how I know it was yours?

Yeah. It was quite hard to figure out at first, but with a bit of sleuthing I got it.

I understand writing your name inside the cover, I understand highlighting passages if you’re reading it in school, which I assume is why you had this copy, that stuff is totally fine by me. This is the stuff I have a problem with:

Aaaand this:

If you’d read an earlier blog post I wrote, which I’m sure you didn’t because we don’t know each other, you would know how I feel about leaving books open, face down, and for all I know, you could have done that to this poor book as well, but I think that maybe I wasn’t clear enough about my opinion on other forms of book treatment. From what I can tell you haven’t dog eared the pages, but your other transgressions are crime enough in my eyes.

I can foresee two possible solutions to this problem. Neither of them fix the current state of Lord of the Flies, but I’m willing to overlook that if you implement at least one of these options.

1. You stop writing in your books unless it’s for purely academic purposes, because no one  likes a book that’s been written in in pink highlighter; or
2. You stop donating books that you have written in, because while it is interesting to read people’s notes in the margins, I haven’t found that your particular style of notes gave any enlightenment to my experience and enjoyment of this book

I hope we can work together to come up with a solution that is best for the whole book-reading community at large.

Yours Sincerely,

Teya of Eddie’s Sofa
Book-reader, and concerned member of the Society of Book Nerds (SoBN)