Summer holidays are a season when you have more time for reading in peace, and for seeking inspiration and knowledge in books. How to make the things you read stay with you for longer? Check our short guide on how to work with a book and efficiently note down your observations when reading.
Read wherever you want
Few of us read books by a desk, with all the necessary tools for note taking within reach. Rather, we do our reading in other places: in a chair, in bed or to pass the time during travel. As such we typically have neither the space nor the time to settle down in peace and comfort with a notebook and take extensive notes. Notes made from books have to be taken efficiently, quickly and practically. What gadgets are worth having at hand when engaging in any read, not only during holidays?
Leave your mark
By using coloured markers, we can easily … turn a book into a colourful critter. The effect may be a bit funny, but seriously speaking, this is the quickest, cleanest and most effective way of marking fragments of text that interest us, regardless of where we do our reading. An unquestionable advantage of the markers is that they don’t tend to fall off, and they always remain right where we’d put them. Thus, returning to the marked, most important fragments can resemble a short and easy to read novella. 🙂
Ask the right questions
Colourful sticky notes are extremely useful when you want to annotate a fragment of a text with a short, concise comment or note down a brief quote or question. When choosing your sticky notes, you can even go ahead and match their colours to individual categories of comments, e.g. a yellow note can entail a question, while a green one can hold a phrase. In this way, regardless of what you’re reading, you can easily browse the book for specific types of annotations.
Note as you like
Pages taken from a notebook are an appropriate vessel for summaries, longer quotes or reflections that occur to you during the process of reading. The pages can be of any format, as the bigger ones can be folded and put inside, while the smaller ones kept within will safely await the time when you decide to read the book again or review your notes. When it comes to both longer quotes and solitary phrases, it’s worth using fine writing tools rather than broad ones. The reason is simple – a fine pen will fit more content. :p
We believe that writing on books is not a desirable solution. That’s why it’s worth using the above guidelines to make the most of your holiday reading. More books await on the pile, and your time for diving into them during the summer holidays gets shorter with every passing week. Have a great read and good luck!
