I HAVE NO NOTEBOOK AND I MUST SCREAM

on annotating and choosing to be a slow reader

I started annotating my books and taking copious notes on what I was reading back in 2020. There was nothing else to do with my time—housebound, I turned to composition notebooks, cute little journals from Target or from Amazon, and I let myself read slowly. There was, originally, not many frills to the ordeal. I put stickers on some of the pages and highlighted sentences that interested me, put tabs on quotes or paragraphs that I wanted to return to. Later, I progressed to two, three highlights per book (lines that kill, interesting, important, sometimes character-specific highlights if it was a book I was revisiting) and multiple tabs, chaotic-colorful reading journals filled with my literary progress. Trips to past reading journals reveal someone obsessed with tidiness, with aesthetics. Desperately I wanted to impress myself and, I suppose, people on the internet. Look how clever Yah Yah is! How erudite!

I think I burnt myself out this January. Already since I finished the first draft of On Sundays, She Picked Flowers and after my two-month long flu, I wasn’t really feeling the written word. It was hard to sit and read something, harder to bring myself to commentate on what I was reading, especially if I was bedbound, hemmed in by my two comforters, a weighted blanket and a particularly chubby tortoiseshell cat. I put on a brave face, barreled through a few books and took what notes I could, but at the end of January, I made myself take a break.

Not from reading, of course. A writer’s life blood is books, and without it, we are nothing and we have nothing. I decided, instead, that for all of February, I wouldn’t do any annotating. No reading journal, no tabs, no highlighters, no fancy layouts and stickers—just me, a paperback, and my bed (or chair, or a park bench, or MARTA train, etc.) I thought if I snapped the thread between my pen and the pages of my reading journal, I could return to a former version of myself, the me at twenty-one and twenty-two, twenty-three, who could read over a hundred books a year. I thought I needed a reset to make me more efficient, faster; surely, if I wasn’t wasting my time illuminating the margins of my books with spirals and swirls, question marks, silly statements, I could be ten, twenty books ahead of my goal. Right?

WOMP! Wrong! Because here’s the thing: you cannot expedite the process of reading. You miss things, speeding through, and you fool yourself into thinking you’ll remember, why wouldn’t you remember, but of course, you can’t. And beyond the hubris of the human mind, there is a need for reverence. Yes, reverence, a sort of worshipfulness that comes from understanding the sheer amount of work that goes into writing a good book. An author’s words are frangible, carefully chosen. They mean something, each of them, and were picked with purpose, arranged oh-so-delicately in sentences that go down as smooth as cream.

Writing my second draft of On Sundays, She Picked Flowers helped me understand the importance of slowness and of patience. You have to be patient, writing. Sentences take time to structure, and you can lose hours searching for words good decent evocative enough. Characters that seem unimportant to a reader take weeks to develop; you delete their lines and write them back in, edit them, re-edit them, and then delete them again. The plot twists, it turns, it runs back on itself. A writer, a good writer, stresses themselves ten times a session, at the least. You come from writing scenes like a horse after a race, frothing, drooling, chest heaving with exertion.

The books I read in February, I was unfair to. I read them, yes, and I enjoyed them, and I could probably give you the basic summary of each one, but I didn’t love them like I loved other books. Too busy was I, rushing to get this book done by its deadline, and I often grew frustrated, reading others’ words when all I truly wanted was to be writing my own. I left those books with little more than a shrug—they were books, I finished them, another tome ticked off my ever-growing TBR. Nothing changed in me, nothing was taken or transformed.

While my March had been equally busy, I was slower with my reading, more patient, and I took my time, let myself be confused. I didn’t read much of anything in March, but I think that’s okay! Accepting, begrudgingly, that reading is not meant to be a race or a push to prove how erudite I am (that’s a big word for Elmo!) means there will be months when none of the books I pick up hit, months when my mind is just not ready to be given new information.

So! All this to say, all this pretty flowy language to come to this one point—I am learning to be slow, I am teaching myself how not to rush, I am showing myself grace and patience. Through the process of reading notebooks and copious notes, I am unearthing the girl in the me that could tear through countless books in a year, not because they had something to prove or a literary reputation to uphold, but because they genuinely, seriously loved to read.

Um! Discussion questions for the class: Are you learning anything about yourself and your reading habits this year? What drives you to read?