A Shelf of Unfinished Poetry
I abandoned it halfway and came back a year later, glad I did. The shift showed up bit by bit, then all at once.
What I kept
Margins are where reading turns into thinking. Modest, repeatable steps beat big plans nearly every time. There is no single right way to approach annotating, but some ways are kinder than others. It is not glamorous, but it holds up.
Half of the work is deciding what to leave out. I read it once fast and once bit by bit, and they were different books. Between rereading and reading bit by bit, the second one taught me more. The best passages are the ones I copied out by hand. Every reading list says as much about the reader as the books.
In practice
It is effortless to overthink reading bit by bit. It is harder to just start. The best advice I got was plainly to slow down. Short books are not lesser books; regularly they are the opposite. This is less a walkthrough and more a record of what worked for me.
I keep a short list of things to try next; annotating is near the top.
This began as a quick note and bit by bit turned into something longer.
long books