/lit/ - Literature

It's merely ocd.

>>7400702
No no and no.

Pic related looks like something an insane man would do.

Every single time I pick up a used book that ends up having notes in it, the notes stop after 10 pages.

>>7400722
So does 4chan.

Coincidence?

I think not.

>>7400702
I don't want my book looking like shit, so every book I am seriously reading/studying and want notes for later-checking I write the notes in a separated notebook specifically for that.

>page, lines, why I am doing a note on it. Maybe connect it with other notes

>still using paged view
>2015 anno domini

I jot stuff in the margins sometimes
My Pynchon books have lots of insights which are great to see as I reread and realize how wrong I was the last time only to have it happen again on reread

I underline every c and o and c and k in order on a page and when I get one that spells cock I put my cock on it and slam the book shut as hard as I can

Sometimes I get a papercut on the head and I cum so fucking hard

>>7400702
Only for books I'm using to research my personal project, which is usually mythology, history, folklore, etc.

My general rule is to avoid doing it in a book that's rare, expensive, beautiful or very old, if I can help it. I recently just got a new copy of the Mabinogion for this reason.

Even then, I only highlight if its' something that I find specifically interesting.
>Obscure fact
>Description of appearance or possessions
>People, spirits, deities, magic spells or items, mythical creatures, interesting tidbits, etc.

My system;
Highlighter for marking a passage.
Red pen for general notes
Green pen to circle or jot down a location
Purple pen to highlight a character
Blue pen to circle or jot down a magical spell or item in the story.

>>7400702
I used to be autistic about underlining but then I realized it was just aa /lit/meme and every professor I've had suggests to annotate. It is useful for quickly referencing things I found important

I used to be a formalist, and so I used to study a book at a time, devoting as much time and energy into figuring out its construction from the inside out. If you look at my old copies of books I read 4 years ago, they'll have multi-coloured transparent sticky tabs coming out like dishevellled page corners, with lists, diagrams, charts and graphs showing characters, dates, events, symbols, motifs and references. Many pages will have a little rounded arrow next to an underlined word or phrase with a different page noted next to it, meaning that it refers to a specific event from a previous page. I used to take a week to read a book because I would read it through once then read it again while taking careful notes in this manner and reading supplemental material from the university library.

I took that whole "better to know a few books in-depth than a lot superficially" expression to heart.

>>7401048
Why'd you stop? Not worth the trouble?

>>7401048

It only took you a week to do all that? I wish I was smart.

>>7401090
That's one of my early efforts, before I'd gotten the system down to what it became eventually. I was really ambitious back then, though. After I read OTR, I read the Original Scroll, compared the excised passages with the contextual pages in the published version, referenced some of Kerouac's letters and interviews and even dipped into some of Cassady's commentaries. I decided to stick to the original published version since it had the most bearing on literary history, as opposed to the Original Scroll which, on the whole, was more interesting to the history of the Beat movement as a cultural event.

>>7401062
I think it did become a heavier burden than I would've liked. I remember one of the last things I tried to do back then was read Ulysses with Ulysses Annotated opened side-by-side. Also, Gabler was a try-hard, and I can tell.

I take mental notes of things. That's about it, I just enjoy getting what I can out of a book and if some of it goes over my head that's alright.

>>7401048
Holy shit teach me your ways

>>7401048
Is 'On the Road' a particularly deep book or do you rigorously keep notes like that on alot of books?

>>7401048
just finished my BA, am i doing it right

I use the stickers instead of markers, because library books. I usually start with a color code and then i run out of one color and it all becomes a mess)

>>7401048
I've done similar with Lot 49, GR, and Naked Lunch
feels so good to have your own expansive supplementary notes when you reread

>>7400702

If you have to take that many notes, maybe you shouldn't be reading that book yet.

>>7400715
Or a college student

>>7401591
Considering the book is Robert Mitchum's autobiography I'm leaning toward insane man

>>7401193
That's how I read tbqhfam

I use google books for my e-reader and when I hilight sections, those parts are saved into a docs document. Fucking love it, means I can post the bits to here and into notes super easily.

I tend to hilight things I feel I could learn from so concepts, theories, allegories and pretty prose are the things I pick out.

I never took notes or highlighted in highschool which made my composition teacher (total idiot) extremely fucking mad

>>7401531
Surely it's the exact opposite...if the book is too far above you, you'll have no idea what to note.