How to Annotate Books for Fun plus FREE Printables!

Hello friends! Today I’m bringing you a follow up on one of my most popular posts – How to Annotate Books for Fun! I love annotating books, so I thought I’d go into some more details in this post and give you all some FREE printables! Let’s dive in!

How to Annotate Books!

Annotating for Fun!

I know a lot of people annotate books for school or university, but this post is more about annotating for fun. I love annotating fantasy and science fiction books, but my methods work for any book.

The first thing you need to know is that there are many possible ways of annotating books for fun. You can try them all and see which one works best for you. For me personally, it depends on the reason why I’m reading a book. I’ll get into that a little later. First, let’s go over my key!

Annotation Key!

My basic key for annotating a physical book looks like this:

Red – Scenes that make me angry/things I dislike

Pink – Romance moments / Friendship moments

Orange – Important Stuff/Relatable moments

Yellow – Worldbuilding

Green – Representation

Blue – Sad moments/scenes that make me sad

Dark Purple – Favourite quotes/moments

Light Purple – Character Building

You obviously don’t have to use all of these colours. You can also assign different colours to each category. So for example, if you want to use green for character moments, you can do that! I often assign different colours to different categories just to mix it up, or if I want the colours to match the book cover better. (You can download this annotation key below!)

For books I digitally annotate I only use four colours!

Here is my digital annotation key:

Yellow – Characters

Orange – Important Stuff

Blue – Favourite Quotes/Moments

Pink – Worldbuilding

These four colours came with my kindle, so that’s why I use them. If you use a different e-reader, you can use different colours.

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Annotation Supplies!

Here’s where you can get super creative! I love stationery (who doesn’t?) and using all my pens to annotate. However, you don’t need anything fancy to do this.

Here are some of the basics you’ll need:

• A black pen (I use one of those pens that you can erase! It’s super handy)
• A ruler
• A pencil (If you don’t want to write in pen)
• Small sticky notes
• Highlighters
• Coloured pens
• Eraser
• Block sticky notes
• Notecards

Let’s get into methods, and you’ll see what I mean when I say you don’t have to do anything fancy.

Annotation Method One: Simple

I often use this method when I’m reading large fantasy books or when I am buddy reading a book. I simply place one of the notecards every 50 or so pages and write my thoughts or small summaries when I get there.

This doesn’t take up too much time, and you don’t have to write in your books. You can always go back to those notes if you need to discuss the book. Or you can give yourself a recap if you read big fantasy books!

Annotation Method Two: Review

I use this method when I’m reading books for review, or when I make one of those “10 Reasons to Read …” lists. This one is really simple. You grab your black pen, a single colour of the small sticky note, and the block sticky note.

I used this method when I was reading Midnight Sun. I only tabbed with one colour and wrote down my thoughts. If you don’t want to write in your book, you can use the block sticky note to write your thoughts. You can also use this method on your first read-through of a book.

Annotation Method Three: Reread

I use this method mainly for books I reread, or in rare cases, for books I know I’m going to love. This method takes a lot of time, so I don’t do it often. With this method, I use highlighters, small tabs, and my black pen.

I’m currently rereading Gideon the Ninth and annotating it. So for when I want to tab a favourite quote, I use the highlighter to highlight the quote, then the correlating colour tab, and then I write in the book with my black pen.

I recommend this method especially for books that you reread. I highlighted so many worldbuilding sections and information that I know now is important because I know how the book ends. It’s immensely satisfying to be able to highlight all of the small things you might have missed on a first read.

Sometimes I use this method for first-reads when I know I’m going to love the book. I used it when reading Aurora Rising for the first time, and it was just as fun.

You can also use this annotation key that I made! You can download it, as well as an annotation guide, for free below!

Annotation Method Four: Full House

I will admit that I barely use this method, also because it takes a lot of time. This is much the same as method three, but instead of writing in a black pen, you write in the correlating colour pen. I don’t use colour pens that often, since I like the erasable black pen. But if you want to go for colour coordination, I highly suggest this method.

How to Annotate Books For Fun Guide!

As I mentioned before, I have a whole annotation guide you can download and use for FREE! Check it out here!

And if you like this post, please consider supporting me by buying me a coffee!

Support Me!

And there you have it! I hope you enjoyed my How to Annotate Books for Fun post!

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