Does anyone here actually annotate books? I keep a pen with me

I marked in the birth and death dates in Plutarch's lives

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I use pic related because i'm not a heathen

>>9832641
I use them too, but underline the actual part I want to direct myself to. How frequently do you go back and look at old noted pages?

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Annotating books is not only a disgusting practice, it's also less convenient than taking notes on a separate medium. Why would anyone prefer to dig THAT specific book out of their shelves instead of having their notes available to be re-read and expanded whenever one discovers new correspondences between what their current read and previous material?

If I am studying a novel I like I print it from Gutenberg, and write all over it. I do it for various reasons. For example, I like to distinguish between paragraphs or sections dedicated to describing habits, and those dedicated to a single episode. Or to marking off sections that occur in the mind of character as opposed to those that occur in the external world. There are lots of distinctions. And if you write fiction you need to do this a lot. I don't have an entirely coherent system. But it gets better with practice and experience.

>>9832708
Why not both? I use post-it notes for a current reading's annotations, and then when I'm done, I summarize the important bits with page numbers and dates into an outline in a separate notebook. I'll keep tags in a book for the most important scenes. It's cool to see how your impressions change after a year or five.

>>9832753
Phenomenology of characters? Nice.

>>9832759
Yes. This comes in handy with Joyce in particular. Though it can get tricky because there are large sections describing past events (memories basically). Well it's tempting to think of the actions here as occurring in the external world, but really they are all mental. So you have to think of verbs like sat, ate, spoke, ran etc as mental because they are nested in a section devoted to remembrance. But now that I think of it Faulkner is brilliant in this respect. The external world is described only in accord with the mental structures determining the character's experience of that world. Like Benjy from the Sound and the Fury seems to lack object permanence. Or some such structure. I haven't read him as closely as Joyce.