Out of curiosity, how do you annotate a book that you're reading for review on here? Personally, I tend to highlight long passages and underline key phrases. But before I had the nerve to actively engage with books, I just bookmarked pages with torn up post-it notes. Now, I see the beauty in joining the conversation.
My annotations can best be described as aspirational: I have a picture in my head of beautifully underlined and colour-coded and marginalia-etched books, following the elaborate systems of great writers, but failure's taught me two things:
1. Any thorough system will be maintained, at best, for the first third of a book before I get impatient/bored/tired and the whole thing falls apart.
2. Different projects do better with different approaches. Underlining and notes in the margin might work with a novella, while a yellow legal pad and post-it notes work better for a big classic novel.
Decades of haphazard trial-and-error have, in recent years, resolved into a fairly basic system that alters a little bit from essay to essay. Generally, I have a notebook next to me while I read. The top of the page has the title, author, and publication year. Then I jot down anything that seems even slightly interesting or useful, from beautiful sentences to questions about theme to anecdotes in the text that maybe lead somewhere or hint at something worth researching more deeply.
Maybe that's useful information for you, but I do not recommend my method as a model for anybody else! It just happens to work for me.
Thanks for writing this, Matthew. I was reminded whilst reading your piece of the character Martin Amis calls Judge Time. He separates the good from the bad because he’s the only one with any lasting authority. It’s also why rereading matters, I think. Good books don’t just last over time. They survive a few rereadings over that time.
Thanks for reading, Michael. Which Amis book is that from? Couldn't agree with you more about re-reading. Every time I go back to a book I start feeling at some point in the re-reading that this is when I truly read it, like you need knowledge of the whole to really appreciate each of its moments.
He talks about it in his collection of essays The Rub of Time. I know what you mean. It’s like, the first reading is when you become acquainted, the second reading is when you become friends.
It's been a long time since I read that; it's either in an essay I skipped (for whatever reason) or have forgotten. Maybe time to re-read it... Great way of putting it, acquaintance versus friendship.
I mostly write music criticism, and the trend you describe here is definitely just as bad there. It's impossible to find any sort of debate or discourse about an album that came out 3 months ago, let alone 3 years ago, but I'm just sort of wrapping up listening to albums from 2024 now, and it's liberating to be separated from whatever anyone else was thinking about these albums at the time. I like going back and reading those reviews after I've processed my feelings about this music, and sometimes I feel like I can tell that someone only listened to something once or twice, looked at the consensus, and wrote it down. There's more there!
For a personal reading practice, I can't imagine only reading new stuff, though I've soured a bit on believing that there's some sort of particular issue with 21st century novels. I mean, autofiction is nearly always bad (I enjoyed Volume 1 of Knausgaard but I can't stand the rest) but there's a ton of wonderful fiction released in the last decade. Most of it is in translation.
That's interesting to hear that something similar is happening in the music world. I'm joyously behind the times on contemporary music — what's new to me has often been out a decade or more. I recently told everyone I met about this Lana Del Rey singer whose Chemtrails album I'd really enjoyed, and I got a bunch of verbal head-pats as they all confirmed that, yes, they and the rest of the world had heard of her...
I rarely pick up books that are fresh off the press. Almost everything I read is on the backlist. I find I need to let books cure on the shelf for a bit before I sit down to savor them. Thanks for the thoughtful piece Matthew.
I love that phrase, letting the books "cure on the shelf". There are some incredible books being published right now (some of them by writers here on Substack), and I read a fair number of them, but I often feel like the hedonic treadmill of "being relevant" demands I read more of them, and more promptly, so that I can have a hot take to publish. The reading experience feels a little more authentic when I let a book breathe for even just six months or so.
Out of curiosity, how do you annotate a book that you're reading for review on here? Personally, I tend to highlight long passages and underline key phrases. But before I had the nerve to actively engage with books, I just bookmarked pages with torn up post-it notes. Now, I see the beauty in joining the conversation.
My annotations can best be described as aspirational: I have a picture in my head of beautifully underlined and colour-coded and marginalia-etched books, following the elaborate systems of great writers, but failure's taught me two things:
1. Any thorough system will be maintained, at best, for the first third of a book before I get impatient/bored/tired and the whole thing falls apart.
2. Different projects do better with different approaches. Underlining and notes in the margin might work with a novella, while a yellow legal pad and post-it notes work better for a big classic novel.
Decades of haphazard trial-and-error have, in recent years, resolved into a fairly basic system that alters a little bit from essay to essay. Generally, I have a notebook next to me while I read. The top of the page has the title, author, and publication year. Then I jot down anything that seems even slightly interesting or useful, from beautiful sentences to questions about theme to anecdotes in the text that maybe lead somewhere or hint at something worth researching more deeply.
Maybe that's useful information for you, but I do not recommend my method as a model for anybody else! It just happens to work for me.
This is fascinating, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for writing this, Matthew. I was reminded whilst reading your piece of the character Martin Amis calls Judge Time. He separates the good from the bad because he’s the only one with any lasting authority. It’s also why rereading matters, I think. Good books don’t just last over time. They survive a few rereadings over that time.
Thanks for reading, Michael. Which Amis book is that from? Couldn't agree with you more about re-reading. Every time I go back to a book I start feeling at some point in the re-reading that this is when I truly read it, like you need knowledge of the whole to really appreciate each of its moments.
He talks about it in his collection of essays The Rub of Time. I know what you mean. It’s like, the first reading is when you become acquainted, the second reading is when you become friends.
It's been a long time since I read that; it's either in an essay I skipped (for whatever reason) or have forgotten. Maybe time to re-read it... Great way of putting it, acquaintance versus friendship.
I mostly write music criticism, and the trend you describe here is definitely just as bad there. It's impossible to find any sort of debate or discourse about an album that came out 3 months ago, let alone 3 years ago, but I'm just sort of wrapping up listening to albums from 2024 now, and it's liberating to be separated from whatever anyone else was thinking about these albums at the time. I like going back and reading those reviews after I've processed my feelings about this music, and sometimes I feel like I can tell that someone only listened to something once or twice, looked at the consensus, and wrote it down. There's more there!
For a personal reading practice, I can't imagine only reading new stuff, though I've soured a bit on believing that there's some sort of particular issue with 21st century novels. I mean, autofiction is nearly always bad (I enjoyed Volume 1 of Knausgaard but I can't stand the rest) but there's a ton of wonderful fiction released in the last decade. Most of it is in translation.
That's interesting to hear that something similar is happening in the music world. I'm joyously behind the times on contemporary music — what's new to me has often been out a decade or more. I recently told everyone I met about this Lana Del Rey singer whose Chemtrails album I'd really enjoyed, and I got a bunch of verbal head-pats as they all confirmed that, yes, they and the rest of the world had heard of her...
I rarely pick up books that are fresh off the press. Almost everything I read is on the backlist. I find I need to let books cure on the shelf for a bit before I sit down to savor them. Thanks for the thoughtful piece Matthew.
I love that phrase, letting the books "cure on the shelf". There are some incredible books being published right now (some of them by writers here on Substack), and I read a fair number of them, but I often feel like the hedonic treadmill of "being relevant" demands I read more of them, and more promptly, so that I can have a hot take to publish. The reading experience feels a little more authentic when I let a book breathe for even just six months or so.