Even for people who strongly agree with Barthes, it’s worthwhile to learn how to dissect a book and discern authorial intent, if only to differentiate between authorial intent and individual interpretation.

I get recommended so many celebrity memoirs based on books I rated 1-2 stars. I’ve never shelved a celebrity memoir on gr. Drives me insane.

Goodreads seems to use a simple correlation-based algorithm to determine recommendations instead of something more sophisticated like mood/pace/genre on StoryGraph. I’ve been recommended Dr Seuss after reading Shakespeare because so many people that shelved Shakespeare had already read Dr Seuss. Any algorithm that did more than basic correlation should have caught that that’s not a good rec. I think Colleen Hoover has been shelved alongside almost every book on the site just because of her popularity, and that’s probably part of why GR pushes it so much. That and Amazon sales.

I love writing in my books! I usually only buy physical books that I want to annotate—if I don’t think I’ll annotate or reread a book, I just borrow it from my library. I definitely don’t retain everything I want to remember from books, so my annotations are a great way to remember things that stood out to me by just picking up the book and flipping through it. And it makes me feel like me library really represents me (:

I’ve had good experiences with Powell’s and Better World Books (both used and new for both). I would definitely steer clear of Book Outlet. All my packages from them have come absolutely destroyed

When I first started college, I would write small symbols or abbreviations in the margins if certain words or phrases came up more than a couple times (a heart for dialogue about love, a scale for justice, a cloud for gloom/despair/sadness, etc). Then at various points, or just at the end of the book, I would go back and see what I had marked a lot and think about why the author kept coming back to that word/phrase/idea/theme.

In my experience, it didn’t take me out of the story in the moment since it took a couple seconds to draw, but I got better at noticing repeated phrases and ideas over time.