This month I turned another year older and so I’m thinking more about the way I keep tabs on my life, which moments and mementos are swept away and discarded, and which become treasured keepsakes in my personal record keeping, both physical and mental. Naturally, this involves a good amount of reminiscing, aided by old photos and the patchy hoard of journals I’ve kept over the years, and (who could forget) those humbling reminders from Facebook about every single cringeworthy status update I ever made between the ages of 12 to 17. It’s fun to traipse through the past most days, and also a little melancholic, but these days on the edges of those reminiscences there’s been a niggling discomfort, a just-slightly-off, unsettling feeling that I’ve mostly relegated to the dark corners of my almost ritualistic pre-sleep overthinking sessions. If I were to put it into words, it might come out a little something like this: I think I’m starting to worry about my memory.
Fear not, this won’t be a deep dive into the depths of my health anxieties (thankfully mild), but it is true that for most of my life, my memory has been a kind of secret source of pride, if not also the bane of my existence. Yes, friends were impressed by how quickly I could memorize a scene for a show or by the wealth of song lyrics that I could (and still can) recall at a moment’s notice, word-for-word. But on the flip side, people became quickly ingrained in my memory, and so I often had the experience of being introduced to someone, and a year later when our paths would cross again I could see that they had no memory of ever meeting me at all, yet for me that initial meeting was as clear as if it had happened the day prior, down to where we were and how our bodies were positioned in relation to each other. Two sides of the same iron-clad coin.
Lately, though, things feel more fleeting. Now I’m the one forgetting introductions or interactions, the stories of nights I once thought would be permanently carried with me in the lockbox of my memory are only recalled in snippets or not at all. The edges of my rememberings are a little softer, more malleable.
This is not to say my memory has always been perfect across the board, there have always been fairly clear cut categories when it comes to what I’d remember and what I’d forget. I’ve never had a good memory for historical facts and I’m geographically challenged (yes I absolutely could get lost three blocks from where I live, thanks for asking). Interestingly, books have actually always fallen into this camp as well. Stories stay with me in feeling, but the finer specificities of plot and character and language often leave me soon after the last page is turned and the back cover closed. There are many books that make me wish that I could call up the details of a character’s journey or a quote that struck me while reading, but this never really highlighted itself as a cause for concern. I read so much, it would be impossible to remember absolutely everything about every book. But now, with the larger burden of memory weighing on my mind, I’ve become a bit more determined to keep these stories with me.
Back in middle school I went through a 14-month long academic preparatory program, which essentially translated to an abundance of extra schoolwork and, in particular, an abundance of reading. I had one English teacher who was particularly invested in teaching us how to read closely, and teaching us to annotate a text was a major part of her class. We had to highlight lines that related to the major themes of the book, important moments and characters, and write summaries of each chapter in the book. As someone who had always prided myself in keeping my books in pristine condition, believing it something akin to a sin to allow them the slightest damage, I railed against the practice with all the fervor a precocious 11 year old could muster (which is to say: actually quite a lot).
As soon as I finished that class, I vowed to never write in my books again, and for the most part I didn’t. But I think that belief was a bit rooted in such a reverence for books and an author’s intention, that I just didn’t see my words as important enough to add to the pages of the author’s story. I couldn’t comprehend the fact that my experience and my conversation with a book was just as important as the story itself.
Recently, though (and really much too late, you could argue), I started questioning why I wouldn’t want to allow myself a fuller experience with the stories I love, and why I feel the need to preserve my books so carefully that they appear untouched. I hope to hang on to a large part of my library for most of my life, so why the need to keep up appearances? I started to warm up to the fact that there could be a fuller possibility for the way that I engage with my books. And so here I am, finally starting to annotate my books of my own free will.
It’s certainly a stilted journey in which I still find myself questioning which thoughts I’ll actually allow myself to scribble on the page and which I find too inconsequential or silly to write down. I second guess whether I should highlight a phrase because, am I highlighting too much? (The answer: usually no, though with my current book it actually might be a resounding yes - there are clusters of sticky tabs all fighting to exist in the same square inch of space but I can’t help it, it’s just so. beautifully. written.)
I started this annotation journey with titles that were new to me, but it very quickly became apparent that there were actually books that I was itching to reread under these new parameters. One of the first, The All-Night Sun by Diane Zinna, was a no brainer for me, and it worked out since I included it in my last newsletter and I wanted to give it a reread to have the story be fresh in my memory as I wrote about it. As I got more distance from reading The All-Night Sun for the first time, the book became very hazy in my mind, but I would think about it quite a lot, so it transformed into a very specific feeling, but a very vague image. There’s a pivotal section of the book that takes place at a campground on the night of Midsommar, and that scene became extrapolated in my memory so that when I thought about that book, I remembered it very viscerally as a swirling, dark, tumultuous void. I remembered the intense mood and the sadness, the desperation of the main character that I so deeply connected with, but there weren’t any details that I could surface. Upon rereading it, I can tell you that this was a very appropriate way to remember the book, but I feel so much more connected with the larger themes of the story as well, the fraught relationship between the main characters, the way that color is actually such a strong through line, even though in my memory the book’s image was mainly black and gray.
Another story I wanted to revisit is one I read much more recently, just back in December. The Body in Question by Jill Ciment is a short little book and so it was easy to move through it quickly. I’d had it for some time and when I finally picked it up, I found that I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed it. But when I moved on to the next book, I promptly forgot all of the details that I’d loved so much, remembering only the sparseness of Ciment’s writing that had captivated me, vague hints at the way the story wrapped up. The small moments that had truly captivated me while reading, ironically, were gone. A few weeks ago I read another courtroom drama of a very different style (Miracle Creek by Angie Kim), and all the while I was reading it, The Body in Question wouldn’t leave my mind, and I knew that I needed to revisit it. It was practically begging me to remember the things I’d loved the first time around, and now I’ve been reconnected with the way that Ciment writes the story of a jury on a murder trial very matter-of-fact, providing plain truth, but in a way that still manages to force the reader to judge truth, right and wrong. I have a clearer image of the way that the book is divided, and the moments in which the main character is forced to reckon with the consequences of her actions, and those of others (vagueness only to spare you details because you should read this book, not because I can’t remember them!!).
One of the best books I’ve read recently was In Tongues by Thomas Grattan, and it’s one of the first books I read for the first time after I started annotating a bit more seriously, and it’s one of the books that really encouraged me to push through the discomfort and stick with it. It had been recommended to me by a few different people, and so I went into it curious about what they thought I’d enjoy about the story, and having that question as a jumping off point for my annotations helped me to connect with it deeply from the start. And I can also solidly say that I’ve held on to many of the details that I know I would have forgotten by now had I read it without engaging with the text. There are choices that Grattan made with how to structure his main character’s POV that I’m still thinking about, ways that he subtly portrayed power dynamics and the different facets of queer community. The way that the main character’s arc was so deeply connected to his obsessions, how we knew about his obsessions in the way they continued to appear over time. I’m certain that had I not been annotating I would have still loved the book, but by now I think that would have transformed into remembering what the reading experience felt like, and not what it actually was.
I feel like I’m entering a new chapter of my bookish identity, and it’s like I’m finally starting to have a conversation with the books I’m reading. It’s less one-sided, this transfer of story, even though I’m not in direct communication with the author, it’s enough to be in communication with the words in front of me, to react in the moment when something touches me, surprises me, or even just when there’s a moment I dislike or a choice that I disagree with. I’ve always been drawn to noticing a writer’s unique style, and now these are things that I comment on in pen on paper, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual content of the story. It’s all a part of my experience, and it’s all finally being recorded in some of the things I love the most in this world. Crazy that it took this long.
Aa a result, I think a truer era of margin notes is upon us, in which more of the content of these missives will be taken from the actual, ahem, margin notes in my actual books. It’s only fitting, as though many of these feelings have been quietly forming over several years, they were really catapulted to the forefront once I started writing this newsletter. In particular, I wanted to find a way to ensure that I could remember the details of books more clearly, so that when I write about them I can actually give good recommendations and relevant information. Me being me, this has moved beyond just the realm of annotating, and I’ve also developed my very own reading tracker in Notion (if you don’t know, I am Notion obsessed) that will help me to note down things like themes, tone, specific moments/quotes that I would want to include when writing about a book, even if it happens to be some time after I’ve read it.
And for the memory keeping aspect of things that I want to lean into more, I’ve also got myself a physical journal to keep track of the things I read.
I love it because collecting notebooks is one of my favorite hobbies, and it reminds me of that one blue edition of Winnie the Pooh. I’m excited to fill it out and have a lil keepsake.
I’m so curious to know what your practice is for engaging with books/stories as you read; do you write in books, do you dog ear pages that you want to remember, are you allergic to even the thought of writing in books? Do you find that you can easily remember stories you’ve read or do you forget the details but remember the vibes? I’d love to hear!
HAGS*,
s
*jk, I’ll be back next month.
Currently reading: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Such a cute notebook! I have highlighted and tabbed nonfiction books (particularly when they're related to therapy since I often pull from them in my work with clients) but haven't annotated fiction since I was in school! This has inspired me to try it out again for sure. I like the idea of doing it for re-reads and am curious how you go about it when you're starting a new book fresh - I feel like I don't know what I'm looking for yet when I'm just getting into a book!