Category: Lifestyle

Yes, a process that took me forever to come to terms with and then figure out for myself, I’m finally ready to share with you how I annotate my books.

I do want to preface by saying that I don’t annotate every book. Aside from a funny or prolific line in general fiction, I find that annotating books works best for my sci-fi and fantasy reads. There’s a lot to digest in these stories and annotating helps me not only remember my thoughts, but also dive deeply into the themes and ideas behind the book. It’s actually made me a much better reader.

There’s many ways you can annotate your books. Lots of folks use colorful tabs to separate out their reactions and thoughts. Others strictly use post-it notes and pen. It’s entirely up to you how you want to annotate and starting with someone else’s way of doing it and then creating your own method after trying it out really helped me nail down the process. After much trial and error, I’ve finally found the winning combination that works for me:

I use tabs to note parts of the book I want to look back on. I try not to go overboard with the number of tabs because I found it difficult to remember which tab represented what and whether or not it was important for me to note. So, I keep it to three specific parts:

1. Well-written prose and quotes: this is pretty self-explanatory. If I come across something beautiful or a quote that ruined me, I want to remember it, so I go ahead and mark it
2. Important info: This is a catch-all for a lot of different things: character introductions/development, plot points, world building, themes
3. Moments to remember: This is different than noting quotes because this is to remember big scenes. If something surprises me, made me laugh, made my cry, ripped out my heart, I want to remember it so I use this to note that

I use post-it notes to write down bigger thoughts or themes I want to explore more. The post-it notes are mostly there to help me write down stray thoughts and ideas that float through my head while I’m reading. If I don’t write it down it will flutter out of my head or I’ll become too distracted trying to remember what I was thinking that I will lose focus on the book. This allows me to get those thoughts out of my head, but it also helps to look back on when I’m ready to write the review.

I underline and write reactions to sentences and passages throughout the book. This is probably the most crucial part and the part that keeps me engaged in the story because I need to pay attention to what I’m underlining. Interacting with the book by underlining passages and writing my reaction (either with a quick abbreviation or even draw an emoji) actually helps me retain the story better. I guess being a part of the book by writing down my reactions actually helps me be more active in the reading process. When I want to note things, I find myself paying much more attention to the story than letting my brain drift off.

I love the way my books look after I’m reading. This was an expected effect because I was sure I would be annoyed by the way my books looked after I finished reading. It was quite the opposite. Similarly to the characters in the book, I feel like I went on this journey with them. I also have been rereading books I’ve dabbled in annotating with and it’s so interesting to look back and see what I thought during a different point in my life.

I have no clue if this is a habit I’ll continue to do, but for now it seems to be working wonderfully for me. Do you annotate your books? What do you like to do?

I’ve always been a one book at a time gal. Spend my time reading one book at a time and immersing myself in that book so fully that other books can just wait. However, it seems more and more I want to read from my mood. I want to have some fun stuff while I’m still in the middle of a book. So I decided to try and read multiple books at once or be a poly reader.

A poly reader is someone who has several books going at once. Depending on your mood, you can jump from a romance to a science fiction to a non-fiction on audio. When you read from multiple books, then you have multiple choices and depending on the situation or mood, you can make a choice to read one over another.

Then I realized something, we have been poly reading our entire lives. If you were like me and majored/minored in something that required a lot of reading, you were probably reading multiple texts at once and we’ve been trained to do this with the level of school and classwork we’re assigned to do. But it didn’t occur to me that I could do this with my leisure reading.

Keeping track is what I’m most concerned about. I’m worried I’ll write a review for one book and somehow mix it up with my other book and then confuse everyone and myself on what I wrote. But we shall cross that bridge when we get to it. Here’s some tips on how to make yourself a poly reader:

Reading different genres

This is the biggest piece of advice I received; read from different genres. It’s a good thing I do like books from a bunch of different genres, so I can easily pair a romance novel with a fantasy book or a sci-fi with a literary fiction. What people mentioned is that reading from different genres allows you to compartmentalize the information. The space story is in one part of your head while the historical romance with the rake is in another part. It could get dicey if I ever find a historical romance that takes place in space (free idea for a book if anyone wants it). But if you keep your genres separate, then you should be able to better keep track of what you’re reading. I already started with a romance and a fantasy that are entirely different from each other and have no problems keeping those stories separate.

Reading on different media

Now that our worlds are filled with enough technology that it keeps us awake at night, we can use different media to read our books. I was thinking about how I was younger and we didn’t have computers in our pockets and had to get all of our books from the library. The option to poly read on different devices didn’t exist, so I wonder how those folks did back in the day? Perhaps they did a trade paperback and a hardcover. Or a mass market with a hardcover.

But I’m glad we live in a world with more technology because changing up the medium is a great way to read multiple books. I also like using my ereader to be in-between a bunch of stories because then I can just switch between one book or another without having to get up and find the book.

Assigning books to certain times of the day

Some folks read one book in the morning and one book at night. But I think this is a valid way of reading multiple books at once. I think the time spent away from one story and then picking up another is good too. Sometimes I get confused if I start tooo early on a new book after finishing the last one. I also like trying to finish a book and then give myself a few hours to write my review and work on some other things before picking up another. It’s enough time to clear what you’ve just read and start a new book.

The most important; reading for your mood

If you’re not feeling up for anything too challenging, pick up something light. If you want to get deep into a fantasy world, pick up a heavy hitter. The point being is the ability to poly read means that you can pick up a book when you feel like it. Also, if one book is catching your attention more than another, allow yourself to read that book for a bit longer. The whole idea of poly reading is a choice; you choose what feels good at that point and you can read it or read something else.

I think the only thing I’m worried about is that I’ll start a book, put it off to read something else, and never pick it back up. I guess if that does happen, I can just chalk it up to me not liking the story and officially DNFing the story. I need to keep an eye out for that because I can already tell there will be books I put down and never pick back up.

I hope this post helps you! What are some other ways you use to keep on top of your poly reads?