/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11471993]

Do you take notes while reading fiction? If so, how do you go about it?

[Anonymous No.11472015]

By how do you go about it I mean what do you look out for, how do you decide what's important and what's not. I'm talking about first reading here

[Anonymous No.11472021]

>>11471993
Only when rereading a work I love and want to study. I basically underline and write notes in the margins regarding themes and form (e.g. why the author used these words, what effect do they have, how does this paragraph affect the scene).

[Anonymous No.11472035]

>>11472015
For a first read? I don't do that personally, but as far as deciding what's important, it's a skill you develop once you begin to read a lot. For example, noting how a particular sentence affects the portrayal of a character, or a part relates to the greater thematic arc looming in your mind.

[Anonymous No.11472056]

No I read books like they are Xbox achievements

[Anonymous No.11472062]

Me at my most autistic

[Anonymous No.11472077]

>>11472062

[Anonymous No.11472157]

>>11471993
What I usually do is listen to an audio recording to see if I like it. I go to librivox.org. They have a large selection of the books I like (by James, Joyce, etc). Then if I like the book, I print it out (Gutenberg has a large selection of free books for print), and I study it carefully. The first business is to break it apart into it's parts and then into it's subparts etc.

So chapters, paragraph sets, paragraphs, sentence sets, sentences, etc. Here is an example from A Painful Case by Joyce.

"Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built. The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures. He had himself bought every article of furniture in the room: a black iron bedstead, an iron washstand, four cane chairs, a clothes-rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons and a square table on which lay a double desk. A bookcase had been made in an alcove by means of shelves of white wood. The bed was clothed with white bedclothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. A little hand-mirror hung above the washstand and during the day a white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. The books on the white wooden shelves were arranged from below upwards according to bulk. A complete Wordsworth stood at one end of the lowest shelf and a copy of the Maynooth Catechism, sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook, stood at one end of the top shelf. Writing materials were always on the desk. In the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped—the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or of an overripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten."

The organizing principle of the paragraph is from the large and general to the small and specific. So we go from neighborhood to house to room to walls to furniture etc. Once you understand the organizing principle, then you can speculate about why such a principle was chosen. In this case, it is a reflection of Mr. Duffy's character.

[Anonymous No.11472386]

>>11471993
why would you if you're not going to write a paper about it?