Why Nicole Junkerman Reads with a Pencil in Hand

Ask Nicole Junkerman for a single reading habit worth keeping above all others, and the answer is almost always the same: read with a pencil. It sounds trivial, even a little precious, but Nicole Junkerman is convinced that the pencil is the difference between passing your eyes over a book and genuinely reading it. This page is a small defence of that habit, and a gentle nudge to try it on the next book you open.

The instinct to mark a book is far from new. The practice of marginalia, the notes readers leave in the margins, stretches back as far as books themselves, and the margins of famous readers are studied today as treasures in their own right. Collections such as the British Library hold annotated volumes where the reader's pencil is very nearly as interesting as the printed page. Nicole Junkerman likes the company of that long tradition.

Reading as a conversation

A book read without a pencil is a monologue: the author speaks, and you nod along, and an hour later much of it has quietly slipped away. A book read with a pencil is a conversation. You agree in the margin, you argue, you ask a question, you mark the sentence that took your breath. Nicole Junkerman finds that this small physical act of responding keeps the mind genuinely present, rather than drifting two paragraphs behind the eyes.

There is a reason this works, and it is not mysterious. Engaging actively with material, rather than passively receiving it, is one of the most reliable ways to understand and remember it. Educational research describes this under headings such as the testing effect, the finding that retrieving and working with an idea fixes it far better than rereading ever could. A pencil is a humble, everyday way of reading actively, and Nicole Junkerman reaches for it without thinking.

What the marks mean

Over years of reading, a small private language develops, and Nicole Junkerman keeps it deliberately simple so that it never gets in the way of the reading itself:

• A straight underline for a sentence worth keeping or quoting later.
• A wavy line for something you are not sure you agree with, to revisit with a cooler head.
• A question mark for anything not yet understood, so the gaps are easy to find on a second pass.
• A star, used rarely, for the lines that genuinely matter, the ones you might copy into the notebook.

The exact symbols are not the point. The point is that a marked book becomes a map of your own reading, showing where you slowed down, where you struggled and where you were moved. Nicole Junkerman can open a book read years ago and, from the pencil alone, recover almost exactly what it felt like to read it for the first time.

Why a pencil, not a pen

Nicole Junkerman is firmly on the side of pencil over pen, and not only out of respect for the page. A pencil is forgiving. It invites you to mark freely, because nothing is permanent, and that freedom is exactly what makes the habit stick. A pen makes you hesitate, and hesitation is the enemy of an active reader. The light, erasable line lowers the stakes until marking the book feels as natural as turning the page.

From the margin to the notebook

The pencil does its best work after the book is finished. Nicole Junkerman goes back through the marked pages and copies the strongest lines and questions into the learning notebook, where they join everything else worth keeping. This is the moment a passing mark becomes a permanent note, and it is closely related to the old habit of the commonplace book, the personal anthology readers have kept for centuries. The book lends the sentence; the notebook gives it a home.

This small ritual also solves a real problem. A marked book is wonderful, but you cannot carry your whole library around, and you certainly cannot search it. The notebook gathers the best of every book into one place you can actually return to. If you keep one alongside your reading, the ideas you meet stop being scattered across a hundred shelves and start, slowly, to talk to each other. Nicole Junkerman treats the two habits, marking and noting, as a single practice in two parts.

A gentle word for the nervous

Many readers flinch at the thought of writing in a book, and Nicole Junkerman understands the feeling entirely. Two gentle reassurances. First, library and borrowed books are sacred, so for those a slip of paper or a note on the phone does the same job. Second, your own books are tools, not ornaments, and a tool is honoured by use. If the idea still troubles you, start with a cheap paperback or a free text from Project Gutenberg and mark it without mercy. The freedom is the whole point.

What the marks teach you about yourself

There is an unexpected reward in returning, years later, to a book you marked heavily. The pencil becomes a record not only of the book but of the person who read it. You see where a younger self underlined something that now seems obvious, or questioned something you have since come to accept. Nicole Junkerman finds these encounters quietly moving, a way of meeting your own past mind in the margins and noticing, with some affection, how far it has travelled.

The marks can also reveal patterns you would never have noticed otherwise. Flick through several marked books and you start to see what consistently catches your attention: a certain kind of sentence, a recurring theme, a particular sort of argument. Nicole Junkerman treats this as a slow form of self-knowledge. The pencil quietly maps your taste and your preoccupations, and reading that map back can tell you a good deal about what you truly care to think about.

None of this requires elaborate equipment or any special method. A single pencil and a willingness to use it freely are enough to begin. If you would like a richer history of the practice before you start, the long tradition of marginalia is well worth an hour of reading, full of famous readers whose marked books have outlived them. Nicole Junkerman finds it a cheering thought: that a few honest pencil marks today might one day be the most personal thing a book of yours contains.

So the next time you settle down with a book, keep a pencil within reach and use it freely. Underline, argue, ask, and star. A marked book is a book you have actually thought with, not merely looked at. To see where those marks go next, read how Nicole Junkerman makes notes that stick, or the wider seven habits of slow reading. As always, it all comes home to Nicole Junkerman.

Published 8 March 2026 · by Nicole Junkerman