annotating books
One of the categories in this year's Reading Glasses challenge is to annotate a book. I knew that taking notes from the book into a notebook would count, but I wanted to see what other options were, so I went to Google and YouTube. I watched a bunch of videos and read a few articles (a lot of the Google results have to do with annotating books for school) and came up with a system that mostly works.
I take notes in a notebook.
Anticlimactic after seeing some of the BookTubers' color-coded pen and post-it systems, but I don't want to leave residue on the pages, and there really isn't room to write in the margins, anyway. And I don't know what colors to assign to the content before I've read the book. So I chose to go for the simple option: the book, my notebook, and a black pen.
My worst problem now is that I jump from book to book, reading several at a time, and I'm not sure how to handle that. I started a short story collection a month ago, and I am taking notes on each short story in my notebook. But I've started a bunch of other books since then, including some that I want to take notes on. (Quan Berry's We Ride Upon Sticks has a chart that I want to duplicate so I can keep track of the characters.) So do I skip pages and hope I'm not wasting space, or do I say "continued on page 42" and leave my notes for a single monograph scattered all over my notebook? (I think the BuJo community calls it "threading," and if I can see how to do it, that's probably what I'll do.) I haven't decided yet, though.
The short story collection is How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin. Other books I want to annotate soon are The Librarian's Guide to Homelessness by Ryan J. Dowd, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Dune by Frank Herbert, Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad, and some other books that are currently popular due to the Black Lives Matter movement. I suspect I'll end up annotating more of the nonfiction I read, just because I feel that nonfiction's purpose is to inform first and maybe entertain second, and fiction's purpose is to entertain first and sometimes bring the reader's awareness to an issue. It slows down my reading somewhat, making library borrowing problematic ... someone else may want the library book, preventing me from renewing it, and I'm so scatterbrained that I may not finish reading and annotating in the three weeks I'm allowed.
I'll figure it out. I don't have to continue annotating after I finish a single book, just for the reading challenge. But I'll continue using the annotating notebook as a book BuJo, in any case. A reader's diary, since I already filled up the one that a friend sent me for Christmas a few years ago.
I take notes in a notebook.
Anticlimactic after seeing some of the BookTubers' color-coded pen and post-it systems, but I don't want to leave residue on the pages, and there really isn't room to write in the margins, anyway. And I don't know what colors to assign to the content before I've read the book. So I chose to go for the simple option: the book, my notebook, and a black pen.
My worst problem now is that I jump from book to book, reading several at a time, and I'm not sure how to handle that. I started a short story collection a month ago, and I am taking notes on each short story in my notebook. But I've started a bunch of other books since then, including some that I want to take notes on. (Quan Berry's We Ride Upon Sticks has a chart that I want to duplicate so I can keep track of the characters.) So do I skip pages and hope I'm not wasting space, or do I say "continued on page 42" and leave my notes for a single monograph scattered all over my notebook? (I think the BuJo community calls it "threading," and if I can see how to do it, that's probably what I'll do.) I haven't decided yet, though.
The short story collection is How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin. Other books I want to annotate soon are The Librarian's Guide to Homelessness by Ryan J. Dowd, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Dune by Frank Herbert, Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad, and some other books that are currently popular due to the Black Lives Matter movement. I suspect I'll end up annotating more of the nonfiction I read, just because I feel that nonfiction's purpose is to inform first and maybe entertain second, and fiction's purpose is to entertain first and sometimes bring the reader's awareness to an issue. It slows down my reading somewhat, making library borrowing problematic ... someone else may want the library book, preventing me from renewing it, and I'm so scatterbrained that I may not finish reading and annotating in the three weeks I'm allowed.
I'll figure it out. I don't have to continue annotating after I finish a single book, just for the reading challenge. But I'll continue using the annotating notebook as a book BuJo, in any case. A reader's diary, since I already filled up the one that a friend sent me for Christmas a few years ago.
Comments
Post a Comment