How I'm Annotating and Book Journaling Memoir and Non-fiction

Mother Mary Comes to Me & The Karma of Brown Folk

As promised, in the video below, I share how I’m annotating Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy and The Karma of Brown Folk by Vijay Prashad.

What’s most important here is that this is a living project, and I might change my mind! Also, please comment with any other suggestions for annotating or book journaling. And share this post with any of your annotation and bookish besties if they want some ideas :)

Below is the video, a summary of what I shared, and links to love!

Video Summary

What I’m doing

I’m sharing my annotation and book journaling systems for one memoir and one non-fiction book: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy and The Karma of Brown Folk by Vijay Prashad.

Why I’m doing it

I’m doing this so I can think more deeply about books, increase my critical thinking, and reduce brain rot (see Jananie’s Anti Brain Rot Reading Challenge in the links!) — and ultimately this will help me while I write my own memoir!

Annotation Systems

I’m no annotating expert (even though I’m a Virgo haha). Most of what I’ve learned has come from my own random underlining and marginalia, as well as from watching YouTube videos, most of which focus on fiction. I’m adapting this to memoir and non-fiction.

I’m using book tabs, which include a ruler I’ll use for underlining—I have always underlined —and I think using highlighters with different-colored book tabs might be a bit much. I also might change my mind about this!

Here are the tabs I’m using for each book!

Mother Mary Comes to Me

• Key Moments

• Quotes

• Emotional Resonance

• Themes

• Insights 👉🏾 New Ideas

The Karma of Brown Folk

• Main Idea

• Concepts/Definitions

• Quotes

• Dive Deeper

• Insights 👉🏾 New Ideas

There might be overlap—I can see Dive Deeper and Insights 👉🏾 New Ideas being similar—and I might change things up based on what I notice as I annotate.

Book Journaling Systems

I took some of this from Jananie and her Critical Media Journal video (highly recommend!)

• I’m going to journal by chapter after I finish each one.

• Before I started, I wrote expectations for each book.

• Each chapter will have sections for:

  • Thoughts

  • Words I don’t know

  • Quotes

• If I need more pages, I’ll just skip to future ones. If I run out of pages in the journal, I’ll add another journal!

Links

• Book tabs on Amazon

• Bookshop links

  • Mother Mary Comes to Me

  • The Karma of Brown Folk

• this story ain't over by Jananie

  • Anti-Brain Rot Reading Challenge

  • Critical Media Journal

Okay, comment and let me know what you think, and letme know if you have any other suggestions.