How I Annotate and Remember What I Read!!! (War and Peace edition) // 2021

[Music] hello everyone welcome or welcome back to my channel my name is carolyn if you are new here and today we are going to be talking all about how i annotate and particularly how i annotated war and peace i have the last part of the epilogue left so it's not completely finished but i am pretty much finished with the story concerning the characters and majority of the book i only have you know a few a few pages left honestly and i have been filming reading vlogs for my reading of war and peace this is part of the dickens versus tolstoy book club debate that i am a co-host of with my very good friend emma from her youtube channel emmy and i have been getting a lot of questions of how i am annotating boring piece or how i annotate in general besides talking about how i annotate something else that i'm really passionate about and that i want to talk about in this video is how i remember what i read because for a while i was reading books one after another after another to attain a goodreads goal and i was kind of just reading them to get to the next book to get to the next book and i wasn't really taking them in and soaking them in and really infusing them in my brain and in my memory and that's something that i try very hard to do now is to really don't rush through books take your time with them and just enjoy the process of reading them i have found a few tips and tricks that help me to remember what i read especially when it comes to reading classics which is my primary reading genre if you would call it a genre and so i thought i would share that with you guys my annotation system changes depending on the book that i read for the most part i annotate based on emotion it's really up to you i think the greatest thing about annotating is that you can annotate your books however you want or if you don't want to annotate your books you don't have to annotate your books if you don't like using tabs or writing in your books or dog earring pages if you want to keep your books pristine something that i really love doing is annotating using my phone so i would take pictures of certain pages that i want to remember and using the different drawing tools on your phone you can annotate the actual picture and then save it to a gallery usually i save them to a story highlight so that's something that you can do if you don't want to actually physically write or tab up your book but like i was saying annotating is so personal to whoever is annotating so if you want to just use one color tab you don't have to color coordinate eye color coordinate it's up to you there's no set rule i'm just going to be sharing with you guys how i specifically annotate but again it's all up to you which i think is the most fun something that i love about annotating is that it's not just writing in a book it's communicating with the author communicating with the characters it makes me feel more a part of the story like i can respond to what is going on yes you can respond without physically responding in the book but i love feeling that physical act of communicating and talking with the characters and with the author and i just think it's really fun annotating is such a great way to feel a part of the story even more than just being the reader of the story especially with war and peace because there are 600 plus characters and so much is going on and it is a complicated russian novel with a million different characters i think it's really fun to be one of those characters and because i feel like tolstoy really puts you in the position of you are just another one of the side characters or maybe you're you're almost part of the narrator's posse if you would say it almost feels like you are the narrator's companion like you are following the narrator throughout the story while he tells you what is happening or what is happening bringing you into the minds of the characters so annotating just makes it more of a part of that so i'm going to get into what i use and what they stand for so i have this annotation pouch that i have been using for years this is from kate spade but it is just um you can use any annotation pouch you don't have to use an annotation pouch this is just what i use i really like it because the size is just nice and it's a really good quality sturdy it doesn't bend so it fits nice in my bag and i just keep a bunch of stuff in here but the primary things that i use i will go through the one thing that i use all the time and this again is personal up to you i use a pencil this pencil used to be like this big but i have been sharpening it so much because i have been writing constantly in war and peace so that is why it is tiny now but i highly recommend using a pencil if you want to write in your books but you're a little nervous about writing in your books i think writing it in pencil makes it a little less scary because you can easily erase your writing it's not like a pen where you can't erase it so if you are a bit nervous and you're just stepping into annotating i would recommend using a pencil because you can always erase it and then what i like doing is when i use a pen i use it on post-it notes so i don't love i used to write in my books in pen but i just don't like how it looks that's just personal preference if you want to write with a pen in your books go for it but i like writing on with pen on a post-it note so the post-it notes that i use are just these small ones i will try to find all the supplies that i use and link it down below so it's easy to access if you want to get any of it but i have a bunch of different colored post-it notes which they don't really have a meaning i mean you can i have these like um teal ones i have purple ones i have a whole box i just dropped it i have a whole box full of these and these are just the traditional yet light yellow colored ones um so yeah i mean i don't i don't color coordinate my posters but you totally could something that i do do and that i did with war and peace is you guys can see there are the pink post-it notes sticking out of the edges of the pages and that is when something happened that i really want to remember it's a super important part it's an absolute favorite page i want to see it right away and be able to flip to it and go oh my gosh yes this page so that is why those pink post-it notes are there and sticking out is just so that i can easily access that particular page and i also write something probably really ridiculous a lot of my annotations i try to be analytical and to be the you know literary scholar that i strive to be but most of the time it's just me going oh my heart oh tolstoy oh my gosh i'm crying or something like that very silly but that's what i love i love having emotional responses as well as analytical responses to the books that i read so those are the pink post-its and then you can see some of the blue ones are sticking out as well and those usually mean something that is either sad or something that i want to discuss in the debate because we do debate the dickinson tolstoy books for the book club and the penguins are usually for like a page that i love or something that i really want to go to the blue is like the level underneath the pink but it's also something that i really really really want to remember and be able to easily access so those are what the um post-it notes are for sticking out of the page some of them are also in the book like this blue one is in the book it's not sticking out so that's just if i have more to say that i don't want to write in the margins because i write in the margins as well like here you can see i wrote in the margins down here and i write in the little spaces in between the words i write basically everywhere there is space if i don't have enough space then that's when i grab a post-it note and i just add more writing there here we have another one it's not sticking out of the edge that's just because i wanted more space so that's what i do with post-it notes and then the next thing that i do is i use sticky tabs so again i will link these down below i have been using these for years and i absolutely love them this one so they either come it's um a two pack so they come with sticky tabs that have points on the edges and then ones that do not have points this is a full a full color row so i will show you this one i do color coordinate these but it also can change depending on the book that i'm reading so usually the light purple means laughter or i find something funny that i want to go back to and laugh at again and then the purple when it's a debate book for dickens vs tolstoy it's usually for things that i want to talk about during the debate or if it's not for the debate then usually i use purple for anything that's surprising or exciting or i wasn't expecting plot twists foreshadowing things like that blue is when anything is sad or melancholy green is for imagery or if there's a particular scene that i really love that i want to go back to if it's a moment in the book that feels really powerful then i will use green and then yellow is for favorite quotes i love the yellow tabs because i always know whenever i want to write a quote down in a journal or put it on an instagram post or anything or put it in my instagram story then i always know to refer to the yellow tabs orange can change it's usually when anything frustrates me or the antagonist is present and is doing something to aggravate the story or to push the story further or anything to do with antagonistic qualities and then pink is any scene that i love if there's romance if there's something happening that i just love then that's when i will use pink again it can change if depending on the book depending on what i want it to represent you can also make them much more analytical so one of them can be for foreshadowing another one can be for symbolism another one can be from metaphor so you guys can really do whatever you want with your annotating which is again the greatest part of annotating so you guys can see war and peace has been an absolute roller coaster ride of emotions which is why literally every tab is present here because you can see that i have just felt absolutely every emotion under the sun with this book and there are just yeah lots and lots of tabs in here so i'm so excited to once i'm completely done with the epilogue go back through write it all in my journal write down my favorite quotes write down notes that i want to make for the debate so i'm really excited to do that and annotating makes it much easier when you want to go back and really delve back into a book after reading and you want to pick a power pick apart certain aspects of the book that you want to refer back to just makes it much easier i mean i say that and then i look at this and i'm like okay well where where what time do i even do what time do i even go to because there are five billion of them so can make life a little easier but also not that much easier because there are tabs on literally every page and then we are now going to talk about highlighting because as you can see from this page i highlight quite a lot i am that person that highlights entire pages and i don't i don't care because you know it's my book i can highlight a whole page if i want um okay so the highlighters that i use oh the pen that i use is energel liquid gel ink and i think it's from yeah it's from pentel so this is the one that i'm using right now i really like it um i just use it on post-it notes so i don't know if it would bleed through the books but i don't think it would and this paper is also pretty thin so that's good it doesn't bleed through the pencil that i use it really doesn't matter what pencil you use i use a 2b pencil you can use any grade pencil really i mean i wouldn't recommend like a 4h because that's just super hard or a 4b because that would be too messy so i would stick around the 2b mark which are normal yellow pencils um this one's just a wood pencil anyway um the highlighters that i use i use two highlighters so i use yellow for a majority of anything that i want to remember so first i underline with pencil and then if it's something that i want to really remember and bring my eyes attention to when i look at the page i use yellow and then when it's something that i desperately desperately love and want to remember even more than the yellow highlighted pages i use this peachy color so you guys can see this page is a great example this page i use literally everything i used underlining circling tabs notes in the margin post-its the different colored highlighters i've used everything so for this one i have underlined bracketed and starred this page so this is a favorite quote apparently because i used yellow and i wanted to remember it so i put it in the yellow highlighted area and then i wrote in the margins or in the space the paragraph space as well and i did a purple tab so that means something that i also use the peach highlighter so that means that i loved it or i really wanted to remember it i probably want to mention this in the debate because i used the dark purple tab let's see oh this is the moment simon mentioned in uh the debate so our debate is based off of the debate by intelligence squared which was dickens vs tolstoy it is amazing and that is what inspired emma and i to do the dickens versus totally debate and this is a part of the book that the scholar that was on team tolstoy actually mentioned during their debate and i want to remember that and reference it in our debate so that's why i highlighted it and underlined it in the peach and have a purple tab as well as three stars and a little note to remind myself that so again that's just the excessive reader and annotator that i am and then if we go down we have a blue tab on the edge so this is another page that i want to be able to refer back to easily when having the book closed what did i write on here my heart can't handle this typical caroline and then we have some words i like to circle so if there is any words that stick out to me that i think tolstoy put there for a reason or that i think really add a lot of weight and depth to the story or to the page or to the sentence i love circling words um while i read so over here i circled the word childhood probably because tolstoy's first novel was childhood boyhood youth and i always look for the aspect of childhood in his books because i think the way he writes childhood and adolescence and growing up is really interesting and then i just have underlined passages here again highlighted yellow this must be a great scene because i did green and then i wrote and also bracketed in the margins starred in the margins um and then i used the different colored highlighters so as you can see i am an excessive annotator um but that's okay because i love it and i love looking back at books flipping through books that i have read and have been well loved and just seeing how i felt about them and reliving my emotions reliving my thoughts and sort of i feel like you can only of course you can only read a book for the first time once and getting that emotion of that first reading down on the actual pages i think is so exciting and it's something that you can only really do once um because a reread you know you know it's gonna you you know what is going to happen so it's it's different i feel like reading a book the first time and annotating it is kind of like encapsulating that feeling of reading it for the first time something else that i do that again is just ridiculous carolyn um is i love adding hearts i love adding hearts in on the pages so like here we go i added a bunch of hearts clearly i loved this page i don't want to spoil anything but i don't think you'll be able to really read it that well something else that i like to do is i like to dog ear certain pages so if it's a page that i want to remember but it's not like dire that i want to remember it if it's something that i really really want to remember again i do the pink tabs but something like a page that i want to just possibly refer back to a dog ear if you don't like annotating or writing or dog-earing i am your worst nightmare but i feel like you wouldn't be watching this video if you were that kind of person if you are i'm very sorry and i hope that i don't offend you but whenever i see a book that looks like this like this tabbed up and annotated i just feel like it shows how much love the reader has felt for the book and that's really you know this is my love for it it's just showing my love um so yes i always say that books that look worn and torn it's more it's less maltreatment and more like you loved it and you were showing the book all your love and your dedication and i also crack the spine i love cracking the spine i know i'm i'm a weirdo sometimes depending on the book i don't like cracking the spine but with it if it's a book like this i really don't mind i love cracking the spine so i think that is all that i can really talk about with my annotation style i almost forgot to mention the exact highlighters that i use so like i said this paper is pretty thin um the highlighter that does not go through at all i use the it's for the yellow one it is the sharpie brand and it's the smear guard one i don't know if that makes any difference but the sharpie brand i have known to not bleed through my pages which is great and then this next one i got from a lovely friend in my p.o box this one is the mild liner this does say what color it's in but it's a mild ink and on one end the end that has the like peach strip is the thicker end it's more like a highlighter type point and then this one is like the fine liner so it's double ended and it has like the nice um which i usually like to like write my little hearts in or any little notes i don't usually write with it just because this one tends to bleed through slightly it doesn't really bleed through you can just like see it a bit on the opposite page but if you go pretty light then you don't see it that much this one's really light it doesn't bleed through at all so that's those and then the box of post-its that i got from amazon looks like this this is just a 24-pack uh cabinet pack a world of colors um this is the marsai collection i don't know why they call it the mersai collection but it just has the four different colors that i showed you guys earlier so these will last me forever and i believe i just got those on amazon so again i will link everything down below i think that's all the supplies that i use and then now i want to start talking about how i remember what i read and i think that that is all in conjunction and coordination with how i annotate because i feel like the way that i remember what i read is through how i annotate because i'm an excessive annotator it takes me a lot of time to annotate and i think that is a direct result in how to remember what you read most of the time when i forget a book it is because i speed read it and sometimes it's really exciting when you're in the middle of a book and you can't put it down and you're just flipping through the pages not annotating and that's great in the moment but what i've noticed is that when i do that in long term the book tends to escape me it tends to not stick in my brain ultimately and i think that's all in due part to not taking my time to read it i feel like sometimes depending on the book if i'm not enjoying it as much or if it's not a complete five-star read that i'm just absolutely loving i tend to not put myself into the book i and i think that's exactly what annotating does it puts you into the book because you are having that physical exchange of action with the book if that makes any sense so my one of my main things i don't know if i would call it a tip but i guess something that really helps me remember what i read is by making sure i take time while i'm reading to annotate and also to just to read it don't speed read i feel like a lot of us are kind of conditioned to think we have to get a lot of books read and to finish all these books so that we can reach a goal or make a review or post it on instagram or something i feel like reading can feel rushed in certain situations especially on social media a lot of the times even with myself you know i took two months to read war and peace and i can't imagine not taking two months to read war and peace and to just like reading it in one go if you can do that that's amazing but for me i really loved taking my time with it and annotating it completely because by doing that it makes my brain look for certain things and it makes my brain think oh that's a great quote let me take the time to highlight it and by highlighting it i re-read that quote again and something that i like doing as well is i like annotating as i read but something else is i like to read the full page and then go back and annotate the parts that i want to remember so like while i read i'll underline certain parts maybe make little notes and then go back in with my highlighter and highlight whatever i want to highlight and i think taking that time having that reread process of while you're highlighting while you're putting the tab and while you're doing all that stuff brings it into your memory even further than just reading it for the first time and i think it's the act of repetition and the act of slow repetition that really makes your mind take in the words not just read them but to remember them my main main main point of remember how to remember what you read is to just take your time and don't feel rushed and try to try to not think of the next book you want to read because i do that all the time a lot of the time when i'm reading a book i'll think oh what do i want to read next or all the other books that i have on my tbr and i kind of neglect the book that i'm actually reading and i think that a lot of people do that because i've heard a lot of people say they do the same thing so i think that if you're one of those people too try and remind yourself that it's not about the next book it's about the book that you are in right now and it's definitely easier said than done i'm i get distracted we all get distracted but i think that that's part of not remembering what we read is because we're not putting our full attention to the book that we are in right now something else that i think really helps me is to write down notes in my journal or take pictures on my phone and post it to an instagram story or highlight or something and it's all in the act of communicating with the book annotating with the book and taking the time to do these things and i know sometimes if you want to read a book and i know i'm like that too sometimes i don't want to annotate a book sometimes i just want an easy read where i don't have to think about annotating and i can just have a nice quick read and there there's nothing wrong with that but i think that does fall under the line of easily forgettable because we aren't doing all those things that i've been talking about that help us remember what we're reading so that's my main point of how to remember what to read and also how that kind of goes into annotating and remembering what you read and i think that when you annotate and you look back it all comes back to mind and so let's say a year goes by and i forget a certain part of war and peace and i can go back to that part look at my annotation and it will come right back to me because of course through time we're not going to be able to remember every single detail that we annotated in our books but what's great about having that is it's so much easier to remember that when you forget it because you have the note in the book with those annotations and i can already tell now like sometimes some of the very specific details earlier in war and peace i think oh i remember something but i don't remember exactly what then i can go back look at my annotations and think oh yes exactly that it just makes it a bit easier to remember everything that goes on in the book as katuzov always says in war and peace the two greatest warriors are patience and time and ultimately i think that that's exactly what we need when trying to remember what we what we read and trying to uh communicate with our books and annotating you just need the patience of annotating and taking in what you read and taking your time and also the time to do that so of course we have our quick reads where we don't want to annotate and we don't want to we don't feel the need to do all those things but when it's books that you want to annotate that you want to remember that you want to really soak in and take in and keep in your mind and in your memory then then that's what you do and i think that annotating is a key part of remembering what you read i hope this video has been helpful i would love to know how you guys annotate your books so if you want please leave it in a comment tell me how you annotate do you color coordinate do you use tabs to use post-its to use pencil pens i would love to know because i love finding different ways to annotate my books in in different ways to make it more fun to make it more entertaining i guess i think that annotating is very entertaining so i would love to know how you guys annotate and if you found this helpful if you are going to be annotating any books in particular tell me about war and peace are you joining did you join us for the dickens vs tolstoy reading of war and peace um i would love to just know all your thoughts on annotating are you against annotating i would just love to talk to you guys about how you feel about annotating how you annotate and if this was helpful at all i really hope it was so i'm going to put war and peace down now i think today i am going to try and finish the second epilogue and then completely finished this book oh my gosh i can't believe it thank you so much for watching this video if you liked it then please feel free to give it a thumbs up or subscribe if you want to become part of my little family and thank you guys so much for all your kindness and your support as always i appreciate each and every one of you more than i can say and i hope you're having a wonderful day wherever you are i will see you in another video very soon happy reading you

Channel: CarolynMarieReads

Views: 5,075

Rating: 4.984283 out of 5

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Id: bzJw7FGe380

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021