Not trying to start a debate on the merits of annotation/not annotating at all. I’ve just never annotated a book outside of school so I’m curious what people are choosing to tab or note within a book.
Do you mark plot features? Like things that you think are foreshadowing or important background to come back to later? Pivotal moments?
Is it about characters? Their backstory, or important moments of character development, or just scenes with characters you love?
Is it purely aesthetic? Prose you think is beautiful? Or do you take an analytical approach, like noting important metaphors or literary devices as if for an English paper?
No wrong answers, I’m just curious how other readers’ minds work!
by stockholm__syndrome
25 Comments
Mostly beautiful prose. Sometimes foreshadowing.
I love to underline beautiful sentences that formulate specific feelings that I find hard to put into words!! Also things I want to look up again because they resonate with me or because i think it’s impressive writing
Depends on the genre. Beautifully crafted sentences. Things that made me laugh. Repeating patterns that might be important later or continuing themes I want to journal about
I’m just starting to dabble. I’m doing my first annotation on a series re-read. I’m looking for:
Character introductions and development
Relationship development (both romantic and platonic)
World building, foreshadowing, important plot. I’ve also been noting nuggets about characters as they are mentioned like a long lost sibling or a place they’ve travelled to before or little things like that that might come back later if you’re paying attention.
Good quotes or dialogue or passages that make me have some kind of emotional reaction (laughing, crying, gasping out loud)
I think that the annotating is going to give me a different relationship to the story in that I’m slowing down and really sitting with and digesting all the details.
Bonus is it’s pretty 😂
I annotate with (some) nonfiction for the same reasons you do it in school. It helps you process and analyze the text, identify the key points, make connections, and usefully return to the book after you’re done.
I only do it if I’m interested in really learning critically on the topic.
Just sentences I like, or if I am reading it before my wife I’ll mark passages I had feels over.Then when she reads it she can go “Oh I hit that spot where you just annotated ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaah’.”.
For nonfiction I mark interesting/important sections of information. For fiction just stuff I particularly like lol
i make notes on what i read. my own words and thoughts on it
It’s mostly quotes I like, that made me think or feel things. But also just random thoughts about what’s going on in the book. There’s also important character moments. Like one of my annotations in *Love* by Toni Morrison was all about whether or not one of the character’s actions were justified.
I don’t have a habit of annotating because I grew up pretty much exclusively reading library books. I pretty much never annotate fiction.
When I’m studying nonfiction, and I happen to own the book, I might underline important passages. I also have a little notebook that I’ll have with me where I’ll take notes if I start getting ideas or jot down questions if a paragraph confuses me. I’ll write at least a bit of a summary about each proper section to really internalize the ideas, but I don’t want it to slow me down too much. I make sure to put the page # in the notes, and if I own the book I’ll put a little / in the margins next to the paragraph I wrote about. I don’t remember if he uses / but I stole the “mark indicating notes” idea from Stephen King.
I don’t write small enough to fit notes in the margins of most books. My handwriting sucks ass.
Quotes, reoccurring themes, motifs, foreshadowing, characters being funny, words I don’t know. I’m a huge fan of marginalia.
In lieu of marginalia, I leave an index card love note to the next reader in library loans. Unsure if librarians just trash them but I like the idea of past and present readers being connected.
I highlight, underline or write something in the margins purely when I feel like it, no system to it. Sometimes I write down random thoughts I have related to the story, sometimes it’s something I can relate to and sometimes it’s just a ‘I can’t believe he said that and she did this!’ 😅
I don’t annotate personally but, since I mostly get used books, I do get excited whenever I find I’ve gotten a book from a devoted annotator.
It’s like a little game for me, trying to work out what the hell they were thinking. Sometimes it’s less difficult to parse, but I do enjoy the cryptic nature of other people’s shorthand since most notes done in this style are effectively mnemonic techniques to jog memories already formed rather than to convey information to a third party.
Recurring themes or motifs. Stuff I find beautiful, thought-provoking, or profound. And on the negative side, stuff I disagree with or frustrations with the writing.
I’ve only recently started marking up my books. It would have been unthinkable for me only a few years back. I started with non-fiction in the hopes I’d be able to write more accurate reviews. Turns out taking notes throughout any book I’m reading helps me focus on what I take away from it and better able to articulate what I do or don’t like about it.
I recently got the Kobo Libra Colour and stylus and started annotating and highlighting parts of nonfiction books that resonated with me / important parts.
Not sure if I’ll ever start doing the same for fiction books though! I just enjoy reading it and like being fully immersed for fiction books.
I mainly annotate character moments, things that seem relevant to the plot that I want to remember and like, important quotes using a combo of highlighting and underlining. I find it’s helpful to me when I’m reading an expansive fantasy series, for example ASOIAF. I have a tabbing key with 6 different things I want to note and a different coloured tab for each one. I’ve read the first 3 books before but I was young and barely remembered them, but I know the show off by heart; so in this read of it, I am doing detailed tabbing and annotating to familiarise myself more with the world of the book than the show.
I also read on kindle 90% of the time, and because of that it’s easy to just highlight and note anything that stands out to me very easily.
Normally though when not reading ASOIAF or reading on kindle I just highlight and underline, and don’t tab. I just find that if I highlight something, that action helps me better remember plot and character moments.
I started annotating because my teacher recommend it while in English class highschool, and I found it to be so fun!
Our English teacher would read it aloud with us in class (so we’re all in the same page and we can have discussions), and I made a system on my own. Literary devices, themes, motifs, character traits/development, and words I didn’t know/historical context. Stuff like that. I didn’t tab in school but I used a black pen for notes in the margin, green highlight for characters, pink highlighter for motifs, yellow highlighter for literary devices, and blue ink to write word definitions, historical context, etc. When it was time to write essays, I could just flip through the book and find what I need. I also used my English notebook and labeled what pages had the quotes/scenes I wanted to write about. My teacher didn’t tell us to do this but I found this system really helpful when it came to writing essays, but also because I just liked doing it.
When it was highlighting literary devices I would write down what device it was next to it because I don’t have time, energy and the colors to assign a different color for each specific device.
Now I’m out of highschool, in college, I continued annotating and then started tabbing. My system is still kinda the same, but it’s more emotional based now and less academic. It’s like “stuff that makes me happy,” “character development” “sad stuff” “literary devices”. But I still like keeping track of themes and it’s still lowkey academic.
I really like annotating because it keeps me engaged and leaving annotations and tabs is like talking back at the book. When I read back at my high school annotations they make me laugh and I can vividly remember how the classroom looked and how I felt like when I made those. But it takes alot of time. I had a year reading slump and luckily the book I picked up again, which I annotated was really good so I don’t regret annotating. But I decided I can’t annotate every book I read especially if it’s a fast paced book (I haven’t read one that was rlly fast paced yet I just came to that conclusion based on other people’s experience). I am reading a traveling fantasy right now and I feel like if I annotated that it’ll slow the whole thing down. But I feel kinda conflicted because I like re reading my annotations 😭.
Oh and I also use tabs that match the color palette of the cover
Cool sentences or powerful moments. Parts that make me laugh or read with my mouth agape. Themes and foreshadowing.
I’ll usually do a chat gpt or a YouTube video of a books themes and symbolism (making sure no spoilers) before reading. Knowing the themes and symbolism beforehand makes reading difficult books or literature *so much more enjoyable* if not easier. And annotating and underlining those items makes it like a treasure hunt
If I start to notice a common theme or motif in symbolism or in general. If I feel deeply touched by a specific line. If I have any additional thoughts on a specific scene or plot point. If I have never heard a word before I will define it right there in the book. I will even just write little comments on parts of the book that excite me. Etc… etc… etc…
It really depends for me. If it’s non-fiction then I’ll highlight certain facts or important events. If it’s fiction, then I might annotate lines that feel important to the meaning of the book (ex. In Lord of the Flies I highlighted the first time the kids were called savages instead of children and then highlighted it when it changed back because that was significant) or if it’s an important trait in the character (ex highlighting when Sam in Lord of the Rings wanted to kill Gollum because it seems out of character for him)
Or any beautiful sentences, like Julian’s monologue about madness in Secret History
This may seem like a convoluted answer, but I’ve realized a few things over time:
1.) Books are not as valuable as physical objects as I thought they were. I used to worship my own library, to treat it like my personal treasure-chest. But those books really just *sit* there, and while it’s cool to leaf through them every now and then, they’re dead for as long as they’re inert. A couple years ago I had a cousin of mine, a young girl who doesn’t read much, stay at my place, and I offered to lend her a few of my favourite books. I may never see them again, but it doesn’t matter. I’d rather those stories circulate and are shared among as many people as possible, even if every last page gets tears and ketchup-stains, than that they just sit there decorating an empty wall.
2.) My memory is not nearly as reliable as I would like. If I read a book of poetry that I don’t like much, but it contains 2 or 3 absolute gems, I know I’ll want to be able to find them again. 10 years later, instead of re-reading the entire book, it’s much, much more practical if I just leave a small pen-mark on the page and go to that immediately. The same goes for nice bits of prose, or factual arguments that are important to me for whatever subjective reason.
3.) Related to the above, but when I read a book not just for the enjoyment but also to better myself, it’s effects tend to wash away over time. This can be neutered by writing my thoughts (I realize this probably doesn’t work for everyone). I read the entire Critique of Pure Reason 15 years ago and today I have no idea what the hell it was all about. On the other hand, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra a little later and I covered every white space with my personal reflections as I went along, and today I have a very solid grasp of the book. Books about philosophy, history, economics etc. are much easier to keep track of if I just annotate them.
So in brief, I generally destroy with ink any book that I really care about, and the purposes (to finally answer your question) are to aid my faulty memory. I highlight beautiful bits of verse or prose so I can find them again when I want to revisit them, I underline important arguments about topics that are important to me, and I write down my thoughts while reading so that they don’t just dissipate from my mind the moment I close the book.
Honestly, just marking quotes that make me go WHOA or laugh out loud or hit me emotionally in some other way so I can easily find them again.
Not to derail this convo, but now I feel like the shallowness of my reading is really evident. I read a lot but I don’t think about motifs or literary devices. I just read the story….
My father is always writing in his books, so one time I watched to see what he was doing. He was underlining basically every sentence as he read. I think he was using it like a bookmark.
Mine are either:
– Really good sentences
– Passages that resonated with me
– Something I want to go back and think about in-depth later
And occasionally I write snarky comments in the margins if the author writes something I think is stupid lol.