A New Thing I’m Trying Out + Some Thoughts + New Graphics

I cannot even explain to you guys how excited I am to be done with basically all of my classes.  I still have to show up but now that AP testing is over I’m basically free to watch movies, read, and do whatever I want for the last month of school.  With that in mind, I’m hoping (praying) that I’ll be able to catch up on blog posts and get way way way more content on the way for you all.

I put something out on Twitter a few days ago asking for guest bloggers (or potentially long term bloggers) to help me out throughout the summer, since I will be travelling a lot.  I was fortunate enough to get a lot of responses, so keep your eyes out for some guest content going up on Wednesdays starting now and going throughout August.  I’m super excited to share their content with you all, since I know it’ll be nice to get a break from me and also they’re amazing bloggers in their own right.  I’d still gladly accept more guest post submissions if anyone is interested.

Now to the original reason I started writing this post was to introduce you guys to a new thing that I’m going to try out while reading, and I wanted to hear your thoughts before I got too far into it.  That way, if any of you had any advice, suggestions, or warnings of imminent destruction, I’d have plenty of time to hear (and hopefully successfully avoid) whatever it is you are trying to help me not crash into.

So, the Thing.  Annotated reading.  I know this has a lot of different definitions for different people, but for me it basically means that I’m going to be writing comments and questions in the margins of my book, and maybe underlining some super awesome sentences.  I plan on taking pictures and uploading and also writing a much longer post on how it goes once I’m actually done, but today I just wanted to sort of explain what I was doing.

I decided to do this because I’d been reading “Tweet along” reads on Twitter, and then had to annotate a book for school (which SUCKS and is nothing like what I’ll be doing) and so I thought I might as well combine the two and see if annotating my book would help me get anything else out of it, let me write a better review, or just plain old enjoy the book more.    I have a physical copy of The Roanoke Girls (thanks to Blogging for Books), so that’s the book I’ll be using to do this little experiment with.  I’ve left comments on eARCs and such before, but I feel like it’s different when you are actually using a pencil and writing directly on the margins.

Also, there are a couple old books that I’ve bought second hand that have writing in the margins, and I personally love reading what they say.  That being said, I’m aiming for minimum 1/page which is much more than I’ve ever come across.

Hopefully I’m not offending anyone by writing in the book, but hey, all in the name of experimental progress, right?  I’ll keep you updated via Twitter with how it is going along the way, but when I’m done I plan to do a fairly comprehensive post of exactly how the reading went, and whether I got anything out of it.  

So, as far as the book blogger awards go, I posted Twitter polls to finalize all of the voting, and I think they’re over now (you might have one more day so hurry over and check if you haven’t) so I’ll be checking everything out and posting a final version of the winners on Friday!! I’m very excited about all of the positive feedback and blogger love that has been going around lately, so thank you all so so so much!!! 

If you have been paying any attention to this post at all, you probably saw that I’m using new graphics as headings for each of my sections.  I decided to mix it up and make it a little prettier, and plus I found the same picture that Emma used in my header, so it felt sort of like fate.  I thought it would be better to break it up than my off-color purple headers, but I’d love to know if it’s better for your viewing pleasure.  I sort of want to change my featured image pictures too so we’ll see how this all works out.

Have you tried annotated reading?  Do you like my graphics? Want to be a guest blogger?