Welcome back. The past few discussion posts have been pretty heavy, so in honor of a new month and warm weather and the fact that today is my sister’s birthday, I wanted to keep things light. Today’s topic came from Cheila @ Pink for Days, and she’s got an awesome blog, so you should check it out if you haven’t already. I want to invite you to contribute to a discussion about if and how you keep track of your thoughts while reading a book that you plan to review. Yeah, that’s a mouthful, so I shortened the topic to annotating books, but it could also involve taking notes, or any other way that you track your thoughts.

Everyone likes to do things differently, so the way that we keep track of what kind of ideas or thoughts arise while reading a physical book that we need to review is obviously going to be different for each of us as well. When I first started reviewing books, I would place a scrap of paper between the pages to draw my attention at review time. Over time, that transitioned to a reusable sticky flag, and then I swapped that out almost entirely for a mini notebook, where I can mark down some key ideas. Sometimes I’ll keep the notes on my phone if I’m not near my notebook. I’ll still use the little Post-It flags if there’s a specific quote that I want to use in my review, or an idea that is too complex to capture in my little notebook.

I’ve also seen some people who annotate their books and take it very seriously. Like, different color tabs indicate different aspects of the story (worldbulding, romance, quotes, etc.) and their books are just bristling with tabs after a read. I can see the allure of this, especially when you are planning to read a book multiple times, since you’d be able to mark down when you get new insights. It could also be really helpful during a reread, since you could just flip to the important plot points using the tabs.

Finally, there’s this method, which I only rarely employ, and that’s on instructional books where I’m actually taking notes on the side. It brings me back to my college days, where I had a lot of reading to do, and a highlighter was my best friend. Yes, I’m talking about highlighting passages directly in my books, but this doesn’t happen frequently, and it’s strictly limited to those few nonfiction reads where I’m studying something that I know I’m going to refer back to in the future.

So now it’s your chance to chime in. What’s your preferred method for tracking your thoughts while reading? Share away!