The question of what to do with books that I do not finish (DNF) has been an ongoing one since I started writing mini-reviews of a few sentences in a notebook just for me. My process continues to change, but I thought I’d share how I currently go about it.
As you might know, I really like creating systems for things I do frequently and repeatedly, to make my life just a bit easier. Taking reading notes is one of them, as something I do with just about every book I read.
For over a year, I’ve been tweaking and testing this process until it became what it is today. While I wouldn’t say that I have it down to a science, I’ve created something that works quite well for me.
This is actually a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but at long last I’m sharing it with y’all in the hopes it might inspire someone else.
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I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t write a review as soon as possible after I finish reading, it’ll take me forever to get around to it. At which point I’ll have forgotten everything I wanted to cover in said review, as well as the plot, the tone, the main character’s name, et cetera. Oh, who am I kidding; I forget the main character’s name while I’m reading the book.
Yet I keep telling myself I’ll write the review eventually, start another book, let too many waking hours go by … and before I knew it, I had 24 pending reviews. (Though in my defense, the majority of them are left over from Asian Lit Bingo / Readathon since I was focused on filling as many squares as possible.)
There’s nothing like a bit of deadline pressure to make me finally get stuff done, which is why I’m writing this post! 😅 It’s partly accountability, and partly sharing some tricks I’ve used to jog my memory and get unstuck in case they might help y’all out too.
Having grown up mostly reading library books, I never really developed a habit of marking up pages while I read; the most I might do was copy down a particularly nice quote. (I still have notebooks full of these passages, a testament to the hand cramps I suffered in pursuit of the #aesthetic and need to update my Tumblr bio weekly.)
I think the first time I had to annotate my reading — because let’s face it, I don’t like change and will avoid it unless acted upon by an outside force — was for “close reading” in high school. This may have been Cyrano de Bergerac or it may have been Shakespeare, I don’t remember anymore; the point is that once I adjusted, it would not be an exaggeration to say it totally changed the way I think about and approach reading.
Bloggers in the Attic is back for round two!
This month we’re bringing you different takes on book-rating systems: whether they’re important and why/why not, how we do them, how well we think they work, things that should be improved, et cetera.
Continue reading “[Bloggers in the Attic] Teatime: Book Rating Systems”
Nine Tale Vixen 