Patrick’s Reviews > The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality > Status Update

do you usually annotate your books? :o or do you like to keep the neat?🤔

Ah! So, for books that are damaged, I like to take freedom with them and highlight or underline or do whatever I want 😃this edition I have has several pages that came unglued, so it’s not gonna ever really be in good shape. I actually requested to return it to the publisher bc I felt disappointed, and they were actually really nice and sent me a new copy and didn’t actually want the damaged copy back, so i was so grateful because I thus have two copies and use the damaged one 🙂 I’m still trying to think of a better way of keeping track of good quotes in non damaged books though, because for now what I do is I take photos of the pages, which isn’t super efficient bc my phone gets clogged with photos so I’m thinking of maybe allowing myself to annotate in books I really have no intention of ever getting rid of(the tricky part is it’s hard to even give up books so it’s still a work in progress.) I do recognize how useful it is to highlight and stuff tho! Easier searching! And it really does leave physical traces of You the Reader in the book which I think is kinda cool to look back at years later

I feel rude for forgetting to ask!: How about you? 🙂

If I might butt in, I recommend pencil! I come from an English literature background as far as schooling goes, so I had to, at a young age, get over the idea of books being kept pristine. I have tried all kinds of things—commonplace books (which I do recommend for beloved passages); sticky notes; pen; pencil; highlighter. What I have found over the years is that I have too many thoughts to put all of them in a commonplace book—so that's reserved for favorite quotes/passages. Sticky notes get bent and torn and annoying over the years, so those I have mostly dispensed with. Pen is too messy and too permanent. Highlighter is too distracting. So my method has over the years become annotating in pencil—with light marks!—in the margins. I'm a big re-reader, and I always love seeing what I've made note of when I've read a book before. Sometimes I'm shocked by my own past insights and wonder if I was smarter before than I am now haha. But when I was doing my annotations in pen I found they often annoyed me—my handwriting wasn't good enough or whatever. It was an aesthetic issue mainly; the insights were still valid but I didn't like looking at them! I find writing in pencil I can fix what bothers my aesthete's eye and anyway it isn't permanent if, by the time I read a book next, I think it's ugly and want to rewrite it prettier. And, lastly, I will say, like you mentioned above, Patrick, I do this only in books I plan to keep. I try to acquire quality academic editions of classics and mark whatever I want (with an eye to neatness & necessity—nothing egregious) and hope that, one day, if I have someone come along behind me who might like to inherit my library, perhaps they will be interested in what I thought as I read. And if they're not, it's pencil! Easy to banish. ✏️ 📖

I always use a pencil too! It looks clean.

Pencil ftw!!!! ✏️🙌

Now I can respond! That is very thoughtful and interesting Jacob : D good idea too! Yeah I think there’s also this awkward instinct in me that is like: “if my world goes to hell and I need money to survive, I’ll sadly to have sell my books and the ones that are in pristine condition are gonna have to get sold first. I took care of you all with my gentle treatment and now you all must take care of me Dxxx “
And I’m thinking now, maybe for a bigger book, it would make sense to also circle the page number so that way if you’re casually flipping through trying to find something you have underlined, you would more easily be able to find it! Just a random idea that popped into my mind just now lol

I suppose if I ever have to sell my library I'll need to throw an erasing party, BYOE.
I like the page circling idea! That's how I used to use sticky notes, more or less—but they get annoying, and page circling sounds not annoying! 🤓

Yeah it sounds worth the try I would say 🙂 ohh yeah I wouldn’t be able use sticky notes. I would probably have way too many of them heh.