My Love/Hate Relationship With Annotating

What has my experience with annotating been? Well, let's just say I'm not annotating's biggest fan. However, I am a sucker for colored markers and pink sticky notes. 

The Hate Relationship -

I love the experience of reading a book. Sitting down and only focusing on one thing is like therapy for my mind. I get easily enthralled in a story and can't stop reading. But, when I'm annotating it's like a stop and start process that destroys the flow of the story. Growing up, I was taught to dig for metaphors, similes, and examples of alliteration in texts. I could never just focus on the actual plot and take note of themes I found actually important. 

The Love Relationship - 

I will say that flipping through the pages of novels I've annotated is extremely satisfying. I really enjoy taking color coded notes so I remember which theme the note fits into. Also, it is also helpful to see sentences highlighted with small notes in the margin. Typically, I will forget the significance of a line if I don't take note of it in some way, so annotations are a great tool for me. Because I don’t have the book currently, I made a map of their family’s relationship in a separate notebook. It was a good way to organize my thoughts and remember the entanglements between them. I definitely prefer taking notes in an organized way over annotating, however that takes too much time to do every time I read. 

This quarter I want to work more on annotating and find a system that works best for me that I can use for every book we read. Who knows, maybe I’ll only have a good relationship with annotating by the fourth book.