Why I Annotate My Books

I used to be someone who likes to keep her books pristine. No cracked spines, food on the pages, underlines, highlights, and what not. The mere notion of writing in my books terrified me. When I entered college and took up Legal Management, that was all thrown out the window. I have to read law books for my classes and as expensive as they are (the best ones come in hardcover, very heavy and sometimes multi-volume.), my studying style required me to mark-up my books. I don’t have a photo but some pages are just coloured and marked all over with pencil.

Then when I came out of my reading slump, I discovered that the notion of marginalia was really appealing to me. If I didn’t love a book, I’d have a hard time remembering what happened and now that I review the books I read, it can be troublesome not remembering why I liked or didn’t like a book. Not remembering where the cool quotes are can be pretty sad too. Doing it at first felt a bit daunting but now, I think I’ve settled on a technique which I like. And yes, it did help me remember what happened in the book.

Here’s an example from Red Sister, the book I’m currently reading:

It’s a mass market paperback so it doesn’t really have a lot of space for notes, but I make do. On top of the page, I wrote some questions that I have about the world and some of the names of the characters as well as their “class” or “designation”. I found it at the beginning of the book but I didn’t want to flip to the front every time. Some of the underlines pertain to quotes I like and others to the worldbuilding. There isn’t a lot of exposition and I’m not very far into the story so there’s still a lot of things I don’t know about the world. Doing this helps me remember more. I actually highlighted some of the earlier chapters but I decided to switch my technique for this one. I don’t know if I’ll still highlight anything, but for now, I’m doing my annotating with a pencil.

I also tab my books and different coloured tabs refer to different things.

Orange: Something said during dialogue or something which develops the characters.

Pink: Worldbuilding and exposition.

Yellow: Plot important.

Green: Moments of awesome or romantic scenes.

Blue: Great quotes.

 

So that’s it. A brief run down of why and how I annotate. I’d love to know your thoughts with me on annotating. Hate it? Love it? Share your thoughts on the comments!