HOW I ANNOTATE BOOKS

Hi everyone, my name's Kaz, and today I'm going to be walking you through how I annotate my books. There are three main methods that I use for annotating my books. I have the tabbing with sticky notes, using index cards, and physically writing and underlining my books. One thing to note, if I'm using method 2 or 3, I will actually do a combination of either using index cards or writing in the book, as well as using sticky notes. So I'm going to walk through all of the details about how I do them, what different colours mean, why I decide to annotate books, things like that, so I hope you guys enjoy. First things first, I don't annotate every single one of my books. Sometimes I don't feel it's necessary, other times I can't be bothered, sometimes I'm listening to audiobooks. But some of the reasons why I, or you, might decide to annotate your books include I read them for a book club, so I want to have discussion points, I'm going to be doing a review on that book, I like to annotate books that I think will be favourites because I love highlighting favourite quotes and favourite characters and things like that, and also books that I re-read because I find it really interesting to see if there's anything that has changed with my opinions or if there's anything that I've missed. So those are some of the reasons why I might decide to annotate in the first place, but the reason why I might decide to annotate using one method over another is mainly to do with what type of book it is. For example, I might decide to physically write in my book if it's a book that I've re-read or if it's one for a book club where I want to make a lot of notes and write down a lot of thoughts. For index cards, I typically like to do these for books that I don't necessarily want to write in physically, but I need to make some notes about. And this is often to do with fantasy novels because I like to write down all of the little details that I might forget. Even though I've got the sticky notes, gathering a lot of information about one thing in one place is so much easier to remember for me, I can just flick back to that one index card that has to do with all the characters. So those are kind of the different methods that I use for different reasons. Now let's talk about how I actually go about annotating. Method number one, using sticky notes. When I first started annotating books using sticky notes, I used just one colour. Then I realised when I actually want to go back and find a piece of information that I have tabbed, I don't know how to discern between all of the different sticky notes. My next step was to use packs of five different colours, but I soon realised that five colours was not enough for me. Now I use these Jay Burrows page markers, which has ten different colours. To be quite honest, my perfect number would be twelve, but alas, I haven't found a pack of twelve different colours just yet, so I'm sticking to the ten for now. I buy these from Officeworks here in Australia. I will have a link in the description to the product page on Officeworks in case you want to take a look at it and see if you can find anything similar available near you. But these are the sticky notes that I use and that I love. I did also pick up these sticky notes which have a coloured end and then they're actually clear for the rest of the sticky note, because I think that's really handy. It's nice to still be able to read what's under the sticky note if you're rereading passages and things like that. However, with these sticky notes, I found that if I needed to move them, they actually lifted some of the ink, which irritates me, because not only is it removing some of the ink from the page, which kind of sucks, but if you do move it, you can still see the old ink over the top of the new ink, which can confuse things a little bit. Don't use those anymore. Stick into these. One of the most frequently asked questions pertaining to my sticky notes is, what do all of the colours mean? I'm going to tell you. The yellow sticky note is for characters. So I often use this to mark out descriptions of characters, whether this be physical descriptions or information about their job, their role within the world. I also like to highlight any history about the character if we delve into their backstory. I will mark that out with the yellow tab. The light green sticky note is for representation. I like to make a note of any of the explicit descriptions or kind of more subtle insinuations about different kinds of representation within books. And I find this particularly helpful, especially with books that I want to review or I'm talking about in a book club, because I want to actually go back and fact check and make sure that my memory is accurate before I talk about what is represented within the book. The darker green is for world building. This coloured tab is most often used when I'm reading fantasy novels, because we're learning all about this made-up fantastical universe or place. So I like to highlight pieces of information that I think might be important that I want to remember, whether it be about the history of the world, things to do with gods, beliefs, spirits, creatures that don't exist in our world. The light blue sticky note is for important pieces of information relating to the story. So this could be a pivotal moment within the book. It could be a piece of information that we are given that I think might be really important or really relevant later on in the book. But also points in the story where I have a theory. The dark blue is for sad moments. So anything sad that happens within the story, anything sad that happens to the characters, any points in the story in which I cry, they get a dark blue. The purple sticky note, since purple is my favourite colour, this is for all of my favourite parts within the story. So this includes favourite quotes, any piece of the writing that really stands out to me and I want to highlight. It's also favourite points within the story, anything that I love that the characters do or just like really heartwarming moments. It also represents any moment where I laugh. So any positive reaction, laughing, squealing, giggling, whatever, I will put a purple sticky note. The hot pink colour is for relationships. So this is for both platonic and romantic relationships. But I like to highlight any point that I think is really important or a pivotal moment in the relationship between certain characters. I like to highlight any really cute moments, if there's a really heartfelt scene between two characters or if there's a first kiss or a first woohoo, if you will. I played The Sims last night so I've got that in my head. But any of like those first moments in a romantic or platonic relationship, I like to highlight those. The light pink colour is miscellaneous. I mainly use this for writing, so not necessarily any favourite quotes but any really interesting things that I want to note about the writing. Honestly, it could also include grammatical errors, things like that, but it's also just really interesting things about the writing style that I want to point out. There's a particular sentence that I really think encapsulates the author's style, things like that I'll do. But also anything else that doesn't fall into one of the other colours, I'll use miscellaneous. The peachy colour is for questions. So if I have any questions about what's happening in the story, if things aren't described well enough, if there's any plot holes, just any questions that I have that pop up while I'm reading, I'll pop that sticky note there. If I have a pen on me, I might also write that question on the sticky note if I don't want to write in the book, just so I actually remember what I was wondering, but yeah, questions. Things I want to know more about or things that don't make sense. Lastly, we have orange. Orange is my least favourite colour, so this represents all of the things I dislike. So this can be things I dislike about the book itself and how it's crafted, or it could be things I dislike within the story that don't necessarily mean it's a bad book, but I might just be angry or upset about something that happens to the characters. I dislike that this thing happened to a particular character, or this thing happened in the story. As for the book itself, I'll do things I dislike in terms of, like, poor representation, any really bad moments of writing that I hate. If there's anything I dislike in terms of the characters and their development. Earlier this year I annotated my copy of Fire by Kristen Cashaw, and I thought I'd just give you a bit of a glimpse of the different colours that are used and what this probably means about the book. I have quite a few purples, so there's a lot of moments I really loved, probably a lot of quotes that I also loved. There's a lot of pinks in here. With Fire, I really, really, really liked the romance, but I also loved the relationships Fire had with a lot of the other characters. The romantic interest's daughter, as well as her, like, adoptive father. There's just a lot of relationships that I really cherish in this book, which is why there's a lot of pink. This is a fantasy, so I also have a lot of green, and I really did enjoy a lot about the characters. A lot of them are really fascinating, so again, I have a lot of yellows in here as well. My emotions and my reactions to this book in colour. It's lovely, isn't it? Not all of the books I annotate are this heavily annotated as well, but I love this book a lot, which is why there are so many sticky notes. Method number two is to use index cards. This is actually a method that I saw watching a different BookTuber's annotation video. I think it was Big Screen Books. I watched her video a little while ago and had never even thought of this idea before, and I thought it was a great, great idea. I will have a link to that video in the description below, so thank you so much for the inspiration for that. This method is really good if you want to write down a lot of your thoughts, but don't want to physically write in your book, and if you don't necessarily have a notebook handy that you can write in it separately, use index cards. What I like to do with this is before I even start the book, I'll grab a handful of index cards, and I'll put them every 50 to 100 pages within the book. So the way that I do it is I'm reading, I'm using my sticky notes every so often, and I come to a point where I want to write something down. I will flip to the first index card that I can find, I will write it down, and then put it back. Then I'll continue doing that until I hit that index card at the point in which I've put it in the book initially, whether that's at page 50 or page 100. And then I will do a bit of a summary of my thoughts of what has happened so far. So I've got pieces of information as I'm going that I really don't want to forget, and then I stop, take a moment to think, and just kind of do an overview of what I'm liking, what I'm disliking. Another thing that I find really, really handy with index cards, and even if I'm physically annotating in a book, I'll also sometimes do this, is to make dedicated cards. So for example, reading City of Lies, I had two main index cards. This is a fantasy novel, and there were a lot of made-up words. So I did have one index card where I would write all of the unfamiliar words, and in a lot of cases I wasn't able to put a definition or a translation because I couldn't find one. But as much as I could, I would write down the unknown word, and then what either it is explained to be or what I thought that word was. So I've got a little bit of a translation card for this fantasy world. I also had an index card for the characters. In big cast fantasy novels, I find this so useful because sometimes you'll briefly meet characters that pop up only a couple of times in the story, that might only be mentioned once, or there's just some with similar names that you get mixed up. So what I like to do when we meet a new character, I will write that name down, and then any time we learn a new piece of information about what their role is within the world or who they're related to, any important information about that character, I'll write it down on the index card. So these reference index cards are incredibly useful in big complex fantasy worlds. So as you can see, I did still annotate with tabs. I didn't feel the need to write down my thoughts as I went, but I wanted to have a reference card for all of the characters that we meet because I was thoroughly confused a lot of the time. So that's one of the ways I might use my index cards. Another example is in Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. I started tabbing, then got a little bit lazy, but I do also have index cards every 100 pages. I wrote a few notes on them as well. This first card that I have here says, first chapter, really likes some of the uncertainty in his recollections. He has a clear memory, yet he questions or theorizes about the other characters and his own reasonings. I flagged these in yellow. We have a narrator who was young, so I was like, their memories aren't going to be perfect. It's going to be a little bit unreliable, so I thought that was a really interesting thing to note. And since there were a few instances where this happened, I made a note that those were tabbed in yellow. So index cards, really handy if you need to write things down, but don't want to physically write in your book. Which brings us to method number three, which is to write and underline things in the book. I completely forgot to show you the other things I use when I'm annotating my books and I thought this would be very handy for you guys to see as well. First of all, I have this really handy ruler bookmark, so it's quite sturdy, it's made of plastic, and obviously I use this as a bookmark for the book I'm annotating, currently reading at that moment. But I also use this for underlining the passages I want to highlight. The pen that I use to write in my book is this Uni-ball Signo pen, which is great. I have it in red because I want my notes to stand out on the page when I'm flicking through so I can actually see where I've written notes, but this pen is really great because it does not bleed through to the other page. I've had no problem with so far, it's nice and fine and really smooth to write with, so would recommend this one. If you'd asked me three years ago if I would ever do this to any of my books, I would have said hell to the no, because I'm a little bit of a perfectionist and this did bleed into my book collection for the longest time and I didn't want any of them tainted. I was that person who would open their book and read it like this so I wouldn't crack the spine. I'm not as strict with myself as I used to be, don't worry. But I'd never had the desire to write in any of my books until recently, and this year I annotated my copy of Lifelike by Jay Kristoff. Let's walk through what I do when annotating. So obviously I still put sticky notes in, in addition to writing things down. And with Lifelike I started out by just doing pencil, so if this is something that you want to try, you want to try writing in your books, just start in pencil, it's not permanent. But try not to write over any of the ink, because if you use an eraser on ink, it will start to wear that away. When I'm writing in my book, I don't necessarily tab and annotate. So there may be pages where there are only sticky notes, there may be pages where there are only written annotations. Sometimes I just don't feel the need to do both, and that really depends on what the annotation is for. So some of the things I might write or underline would be memorable quotes, so in those cases I might put a purple tab if it's a favourite, or if it's just something kind of interesting, an interesting piece of information that I don't think is necessarily important but I just like it, then I might just underline that. I also like to write down any of my theories or questions, those ones I will also tab with the appropriate colour. But a lot of the time I just like to write down my reactions to things, and I don't necessarily feel the need to tab all of those and make them more important than they are. Just a couple of examples of the things that I have in Lifelike. On this page I have a yellow tab and I've kind of just done a little bit of a bracket and written lemon fresh description, so this is a physical description of what lemon fresh looks like. Up here I've written, such sass, huh, a lot of the side characters were really sassy and funny. I've also highlighted wage slave, which was a term that I hadn't seen before. No! Ah ----! What happened? What an epic first chapter. I had some questions about the Lifelikes and whether their bodies regenerated, so I just wrote all of my theories and questions down there. So yeah, that's just a little bit of a glimpse of how I annotated Lifelike. I also have annotated copies of Vicious and Nevernight. I'll just flick to a couple of interesting pages so you can get a bit of a glimpse of what I've done, but this opening sequence I really, really like, so I've highlighted a few of those passages. I made a note where we meet Trick for the first time. This is one of my favourite passages, so I highlighted a bit and then tabbed that. So I think that about wraps up the different ways that I like to annotate my books. I hope you guys found this video useful. If there are any other ways that you like to annotate books or different ways that you utilise any of the methods that I've mentioned, I would love to hear about those in the comments section below. It will also be handy for anyone else looking for more tips on how to annotate their books. But I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you very soon in a new video, but until then, I will talk to you in the comments. Bye!