i don’t like writing on books directly but if i plan to revisit one / use it as a source in some kind of writing project i will aggressively annotate on adhesive paper; it feels like a happy medium between the two for me, and if i’m using at as a source removing the annotations as i go along is a fun little progress marker
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i've always been a paper guy. i think it just helps me think through what i'm reading if i'm reacting to it in a separate place.
Jan 16, 2025
Also known to use folded post notes and receipts. In cooking magazines and books I’ll use scraps of paper I rip to mark what I’m interested in.
Mar 4, 2025
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It is far too tedious for me to keep an actual diary of my thoughts. As a writer, every single entry ends up a thousand-or-so-word ramble detailing my feelings in lines of purple prose, using film references and sarcastic remarks.
As a reader, though, I love to annotate my books. I write exactly what I’m thinking about silly scenes, romantic moments, and dramatic twists. It’s where I can freely express what I’m thinking and feeling, without any care for what it sounds like. The short remarks I print in the margins of novels, between the lines of dialogue, paired with doodles and scrawls, reflect my state of being as I read. When I look back on books I’d read previously, I am immediately transported to that era of my lifetime— what I was going through, how I was processing things, and how much of the world I’d experienced yet.
Feb 23, 2025
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Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024