How to Annotate Your Books for Effective Note-Taking (Video)

The question I get asked the most is: how do you mark and annotate your books for effective note-taking?

Most readers are hesitant to begin marking their books, and I completely sympathise. It took me years before I realised that the sign of true love for a book, and respect for its author, is to make its pages as dirty with inky thoughts as possible.

This video breaks down my system for marginalia, marking and annotating books.

We’re talking about everything from creating indexes to reading synoptically. We look at fiction, non-fiction, poetry, philosophy and more.

There’s time-stamps for the video below, so feel free to jump around and go to the parts that interest you the most because, at just under 40 minutes, this is a long (but worthwhile) video.

How to Annotate Your Books for Effective Note-Taking

Timestamps

0:10 – how to OWN a book & 3 different types of readers
2:35 – books you DON’T mark
3:20 – the books we’re marking in this video
4:50 – my marking system (indexes, underlinings, circles, stars, etc)
7:30 – rereading being the most important part of reading
9:20 – consider the work as another art form (e.g. opera, painting)
10:00 – tie your markings into your aim
10:30 – slow active reading vs fast passive reading
11:30 – the book examples
11:40 – how to make an index (How to Read and Why by Bloom)
17:49 – dog-ears and indexes (How to Read a Book by Adler)
18:45 – indexes, notes, conversations (Plato’s Republic)
22:43 – reading fiction like non-fiction (The Sign of the Four by Conan Doyle)
24:48 – marking for memory (Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche)
26:58 – marking philosophy and footnote follow-ups (‘On Liberty’ by Mill)
28:39 – marking poetry (Rumi)
30:57 – the Bible and keeping a journal
31:48 – making notes on plays, King Lear, and scraps of paper
32:36 – notes on computer
34:02 – notes on Kindle
35:45 – owning the greatest books ever written
36:55 – marking fiction (Anna Karenina by Tolstoy)
37:50 – 4 questions to consider when reading a book