3 Ways I Annotate and Make Notes on Books I Read

[Music] annotating books how how do you do it hello everyone welcome to another video today i'm going to be doing the highly requested video on how i annotate and make notes on the books that i read i use not one but three different systems of annotations is that effective probably not but it does mean that i have three different systems that i can share with you so you can decide for yourself which one you like and how you might want to combine them so the three things that i use are a reading journal sticky tabs and making notes on the notes app on my phone and i use notion for that and all three of these systems are super flexible and they kind of change based on what i want from a book so let's just begin with the most simple one which is the reading the reading journal in my reading journal i write down about every single book that i read so let me just give you an example of how i do that this is what an empty page in my reading journal looks like we are going to fill it in together in essence the reading journal is where i write down in bullet points my overall thoughts on every single book that i read when i finish a book or after reading like half of it i just sit down and jot down all the thoughts that i have i usually keep it quite short like sticking to thoughts on characters representation things that didn't make sense to me it's basically like a list of pros and cons and as you can see here i'm keeping open some space between fahrenheit 451 and evelyn hugo because i haven't finished fahrenheit 451 yet so once i finish it i will probably go back and add more thoughts of course you can do this in any notebook you don't need a fancy bullet journal and you can decorate it however you want you can make it fancy with stickers and illustrations or you can just keep it practical and simple after using the journal for a while it will end up looking like this this is the reading journal that i used last year and as you can see sometimes i have a lot of thoughts sometimes it's just a few lines and then after i finish the book i also add star ratings here are some examples of the eloquent things that i wrote down in my reading journal character math mostly plot based heavy and political intrigue relatable love interest boring not as interesting as main character why are these book characters so bad at making magical deals and sometimes i get a bit more reflective theme be scare of the unknown beautiful writing distinct voice i always thought beautiful writing equals difficult to read and slowing down the pace but this book proved me wrong so the point of having a reading journal is that i can always look back on all the books that i read that year and my opinions on them in short if you want more info on the other things that i do with these reading journals or like other spreads that i make and like statistics etc i have two more videos just on the reading journal so i will link them in the description the pros of keeping a reading journals that is quick so it's easy to keep up with the cons is that it's not as in-depth although you could of course make it as in-depth as you want but also you know your reading journal might not always be available to you so you gotta wait until the reading journal is available to you until you write down your thoughts okay next up is annotating using sticky tabs so i've only recently started using sticky taps i think i've been doing it for about half a year now and i watched a lot of videos on youtube by other booktubers about how they annotate and i noticed that a lot of booktubers have kind of a fixed system where every color just means one thing and it's the same for every book my system is very flexible and the meaning of the color changes based on the book that i'm reading i'll explain first personally the goal of using sticky tabs for me is to help future me so if later i go through my bookshelves and i pick up a book i can immediately flip to a scene or a quote that i really liked because i put a sticky tab in there so that way i can easily find the parts of the book that really stuck with me so for my reading journal i write down my thoughts of every single book that i read but i don't sticky tab every single book that i read because quite frankly i'm not always in the mood to sticky taba book so usually when i'm reading i will kind of notice if i want to sticky tab it like for example when i was reading the obelisk gate at first i didn't really sticky tap it but after about 100 pages i realized that there were many scenes that i didn't really understand and that i felt like were foreshadowing and that i felt like were scenes that i would understand after i've read the entire series and had all the information so i started tabbing all the parts where i was like you know i should read this back later if i finished the series i have finished the series and i have not read those parts again so maybe i should do that okay so let's go into the different ways i use my system i will just start giving some examples the first example is like the easiest use of sticky tabs and that's just pick a random color that you like in this case it's blue and then just tab every scene that you like and that you want to be able to look back on that's what i did with vicious i haven't finished having it yet but the blue i just chose it because i still had a lot of blue tabs yet so there's not a lot of thought behind that and then for the picture of dorian gray i started tabbing every scene that i found to be beautiful in green and then later there were getting more and more scenes that were very shocking that i also wanted to track so i started using the yellow tabs for scenes that were very shocking and what i still want to do is kind of put a tab at the beginning of the book like put a green tab and a yellow tab and then write on the tab that yellow means shocking and that green means just nice scene so that even years from now i will still at least remember what the tabs meant then we have the star touch queen where i tabbed to kind of help me decide what i thought of the book so i just started tabbing everything that i didn't like in blue and everything that i did like in green and then you can also see here that i mostly have green tabs so that means that overall i enjoyed this book and that's also a way that the tabs can kind of be helpful in your reading experience and then lastly the book that i did the most tabbing on is the ballad of songbirds and snakes lots of tabs here [Music] this is a good example of me assigning a specific meaning to the color based on the book so in green i tabbed every scene that was referring to the old hunger games books in yellow i tabbed every scene that had to do with political theory and then in orange i tabbed shocking things that happened so the pros of this is that it is easy and you can do it immediately as you are reading the book but the con is that tabbing is only useful when you are going back through the original copy of the book and of course you need to own a copy of the book in order to even be able to do the annotating also a little tip if you don't want to carry this little pack of stickers with you everywhere sometimes i just read the book and i write down on my phone every page that i want to put a sticky tab in and then later i just go back and put a sticky tab on those pages that i write down also if you're wondering where i got these i just get these at like the local stationery store most simple ones moving on sometimes using tabbing and writing things down in my reading journal just isn't enough because i just have more things that i want to write down and then i use a notes app on my phone and i use notion for that so the great thing about taking notes on your phone is that you have your phone with you everywhere so you can always take notes or read back your notes so of course you can use any note-taking app i happen to use notion if you want detailed info on how i use notion to track my reading check out the video on the three different ways i use to organize my reading where i go more into depth about my notion page so when i am reading a book and i feel the need to write down more of my thoughts i just whip out my phone and start making notes in there so there are usually two reasons for why i would take notes on a note-taking app first if i just have a lot of thoughts that i don't want to all have to write down in my reading journal but i just want to have it easily on my phone or if i specifically want to remember what is happening in the book so for example if i'm reading a non-fiction book and something is very interesting i want to remember because i will forget everything that i read immediately so i write it down so i can always look back on it without having to reread the entire book you know so notion is also on the desktop but when i'm making notes on a book i read usually i do that on my phone so i'm just gonna do a screen record so you can all see what i'm doing so i'm opening up the notion app this is the home page and i have a specific page made about books and if we click that we get to my general page about books again if you want information on this general page i have a specific video on that down here i have my reading list with my tbr my currently reading and my red and every single book is a separate note so if i were to click that for example this one it's a note i haven't made notes on a deadly education because again i don't make notes on every single book that i read at all um but let me just give you an example let's first look at brave new world first of all we have some general information which i have not filled in yet like for example is a classic and it says classic on rating i i gave this four stars i usually forgot forget to fill this in but down here we just have all my notes so usually i just take notes where i just write down a book page number and then my thoughts on that by the way this is all in dutch sorry for that so it's just kind of a chronological way of me writing down all my thoughts on everything that is happening and sometimes i don't write a page number because it's just a general thought on what's happening and then i just get this long list chronologically all of my thoughts on everything that is happening in the book kind of a detailed look into everything that i thought which is nice to look back on later because usually i forget everything that i thought and then another way that i make notes for example right now i am reading hope in the dark which is a non-fiction book that i kind of want to remember what i'm reading so every time i read something of which i think that is interesting i kind of summarize it like real quickly just really surely summarize what i read or i will write down a quote that i really liked or i kind of paraphrase what was being said sometimes i will write down a page number if i specifically want to know this is where i found that so then later i can always go back and read what i wrote down instead of having to reread the entire book you know it's just easier to remember things this way and for example for which one was it men's search for meaning i did this where i wrote down the main message and the personal impact my goal was to do this for every single book that i read and i'm pretty sure this is the only one for which i did it because i just forget or i'm too lazy to do it but honestly if you sit down after you read a book and just think about the main message and the personal impact that i had on you you will probably remember it a lot better so that's nice if that's what you're going for okay that was notion let's close this so if you like putting sticky tabs and like annotating books of course you can also write down all your thoughts not on your phone but in the margins of your book if that's what you really like doing personally i prefer to do it this way because i have access to my phone everywhere and you can also do it for books that you know you got from the library or that are not your own the pros of taking notes on your phone is that it is more in depth and it is available to you everywhere the cons is that it does take a little bit more effort now last but not least i just want to quickly give you an example of how i combine these three systems for example i have hair meditation by marcus aurelius i've been reading this book for like months now i tab i put a tab every time there's like a quote that i really like that i want to be able to look back at i also write down on my phone just general thoughts that i have on the book just general opinions and then after i finish it probably i will write down like just in short overall thoughts in my reading journal um is that a convoluted system maybe maybe it is but i just really like that i can always choose how i want to annotate based on what i feel like doing at that moment or what i feel like the book needs those are all the ways in which i annotate my reading you can follow me on my social media if you want to get some more book content from me also like the video if that's what you feel like doing today and i think that's all i wanted to say yeah those are all the ways in which i annotate my reading i really hope this video was helpful in any way i really hope you enjoyed this video and i will see you soon in another one goodbye this is actually the second time that i'm filming this video because the first time i did something wrong with the lighting so my voice is like so done from talking for like one and a half hour oh well

Channel: The Book Leo

Views: 45,535

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Keywords: book, books, booktube, reading, booktuber, peruseproject, paperbackdreams, review

Id: zfe0Xvuitak

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021