Alli the Book Giraffe

Hello readers! It’s Friday and my birthday! Today, I thought we could do a Let’s Talk Bookish. When is the last time I did one of these? I know I haven’t done one in 2024.

This weeks prompt was a freebie, so I have gone all the way back to April 2022 and picked the topic of annotating books. This is something I don’t think I’ve ever made a post about, so I thought it was perfect!

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originated by Eternity Books and is currently hosted by Book Nook Bits. The accompanying thumbnail was also designed by Book Nook Bits. Each Friday, bloggers craft posts where they engage in discussions centered around the designated topic for the week.

Prompts: Do you like annotating books? If so, how do you annotate them? Is there a difference for you between ebooks, physical books, and audiobooks? If you’ve ever had to annotate books in school, does this affect your willingness to annotate the books you read for fun? What are some downsides to annotating books in your opinion?

Annotating is something I do not do often, but I still like to. In the past, I only used the little tabs to highlight things that I liked in the book. That could be either parts in the book or quotes. And, I still do that on occasion.

When it comes to ebooks, I still only do this. I will highlight quotes a like. And, I love that on a Kindle you can see what is most commonly highlighted by other people.

In college, I did not annotate books because they were usually copies I got from the library. They would always send us a link to the books for my World Literature class, but I would go ahead and get a copy I could read physically.

In current times, I only really annotate fantasy books. And, I mean those Brandon Sanderson type fantasy books with giant magic systems and lots of characters. My most annotated book is Crescent City book 1, easily.

I will color code the annotations, but they wont be the same for every books. So, I always put one of each color in the front of the book to tell me what it means because I know I’ll forget.

My most common tab is still parts or quotes I liked, but I’ll also do one for world building, one for magic systems, one for a new character being introduced, and sometimes one for a new species.

The character one is so important if the book is like The Way of Kings and there are so many! I will forget what characters look like and where I saw them before if they aren’t constantly in the book.

I thought that doing this would not only help me remember things throughout the book, but it would also help me for when I go to read book two. I am hoping when I read Words of Radiance, I can go back and look at all my tabs to refresh on what I absolutely need to remember. I am not about to reread a book over 1K pages.

When it comes to the question about downsides, I don’t think there is any. Unless, you just don’t enjoy doing it. Annotating is great for marking key points you want to remember and everyone does it just a little different, which is always fun to see.

I’ve seen some romance readers annotate spicy scenes and all other kinds of things. Which is interesting, but I haven’t done that.

Do you annotate books? What genre do you annotate most?

This post was created by Allison Wolfe for www.allithebookgiraffe.com and is not permitted to be posted anywhere else.

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