A word that for some reason I can not pronounce nor spell properly. 

When some hear annotating they think about school and well studying. Having to highlight certain things to leave sticky notes on pages with information to come back to later. However in the reading community not the entirety of it but some of it well means the same thing but you annotating your favourite parts of the book. You write your reactions. You sticky note funny lines. Some do important plots. Others do sad things that happened in the story. They write they highlight, underline and compared to annotating when studying this is much more fun. 

When I first heard about annotating I thought it generally seemed cool and interesting and I would do the odd research about it then I would kind of just let it go. I didn’t have the supplies, I didn’t think I had the time and as much as I thought it was cool I didn’t think it was that cool. . 

So as I read more books and ended up on BookTok and whatever Book community there was on Instagram I stuck to my own lane just reading books and having a good time. 

It wasn’t until I started going to physio and man is it boring just staring at the wall. When I first did physio I would watch shows on my phone but when I went back in for another problem I didn’t really wanna watch any shows because I would watch shows during the day and night and wanted to do something else. 

So for the two-ish months that I was in physio, I brought my Kindle. The amount of romance books I have on that thing is terrifying. So when I went to the very painful physio appointments I read on my Kindle and if you dont have one and or just don’t know what it fully does besides reading. It basically does annotating just electronically. You can highlight whatever and even make little notes. 

Whatever book I read on my Kindle I was always highlighting something. Always making a note of whatever needed a noted. Sometimes it was just me typing “LOL!!” actually that was probably most of the time or the random “OH?”. 

After the two-ish months, I remember just staring at my Kindle officially being tired of romance stories. I could almost feel myself going back into a reading slump that I just got out of just weeks before so finally I decided that I would move back to paperbacks because god knows I have too many of those and my TBR is just getting way too long. 

So on a very long train ride to see family, I decided to read a fantasy book that has been on my shelf for a good year and finally read/enjoy it. 

But I would be not even halfway through the first chapter and I saw these lines that I loved. I saw things that I wanted to make notes of. Wanted to underline. 
So a few days after seeing family I finally ended up going to Walmart which was perfect timing since it was around back to school. 

But going to Walmart I picked up some more pencils because although I am out of school I still use an unhealthy amount of pencils and lose an unhealthy amount of pencils. But along with pencils I bought little sticky tabs. Almost the whole rainbow. 

Now these sticky notes were not translucent but just a normal coloured sticky tab. 

When you go on TikTok or read blog posts about annotating usually when they get to the sticky tabs part they talk about how it matches the aesthetic of the cover and I will admit it looks beautifully done when the tabs match almost perfectly to the cover. 

However, it being my first time annotating I didn’t want to spend that much and I wanted to see how it works. I had the colour of the rainbow which is not that bad for most covers but when reading a book like Cruel Prince and trying to match a coloured tab to the branches the best you can use is orange or a nice yellow for the crown and a nice green for a tiny little bug. It was nothing of aesthetic it was far from it. But I did it anyway. 

So with my pencils and tabs, I read and I annotated and I must admit I had the most fun reading while doing so. Again I still don’t have all the supplies like highlighters and nice thin markers or sticky tabs that match the cover there is nothing aesthetic about my annotating.

Going into annotating I didn’t think I would annotate all that much. I thought it would be a page here or a few pages there nothing important but at the end of the book with a very MAJOR TWIST I was using all four tabs for one page. 

So my boring advice that should’ve been up at the top instead of the bottom. 

1. Aesthetic

Like I said on my first time annotating I used some cheap supplies with a pencil. The tabs don’t have to match the cover. With the first just use some cheap tabs. The aesthetic doesn’t have to matter just see if you like it before you have a whole bunch of sticky notes lying on your bed and keep losing them all the time…. NOT saying this from experience 

2. No rules 

Like I said I will write the most random things on the pages. Sometimes if I think something will happen I will write that or I will right “ABOUT TIME” with like a million of these !!!!!!!!!!!!!!. The tabs can be whatever you want. There are so many things you can decide to tab.

3. Maybe you’ll hate it. Hate having to always carry supplies with you or having to spend more money even though you just spent 40 bucks on a hard-cover book because you live in Canada and it’s not even a special edition… Again NOT speaking from experience. Don’t force yourself to like it. If you hate it you hate it. 

Give it a try. Write in your books, put sticky tabs on a line that reminds you of Pirates of the Caribbean. 

In the end, reading is a whole lot of fun with the right book and the best part about annotating is going back years later to read what you once highlighted and tabbed laughing out loud as you thought about the same joke you did years ago.