To preface this, I’m a librarian. I struggle a lot with annotating my novels, especially ones that I hold dear, because I worry that they will cause them to fall apart faster. Moby-Dick has somewhat proven this to be true, as I have already had to use Book Tape to secure the cover in place, but it’s also really shown how much the novel itself has affected me and the ways that it’s changed my engagement with novels. I think another thing to note is that I’ve changed this copy as much as it has changed me.

I bought a second copy for my final project and decided to use it as a direct comparison to my own copy. The left copy was purchased new at the beginning of the semester. The right copy was found second-hand but in good condition. From the way that they look, I would have assumed the opposite prior to owning them.

While not super apparent in this photo, the copy with the annotations, pictured on the bottom, actually stands a little taller than the fresh copy – as though my own interpretations have caused the very pages to swell with new meaning.

Through this class, I’ve fully grown comfortable with annotating as a means of better understanding and taking the time to slow down with a novel. My annotations started as simple personal notes – haha, oh wow, etc – and evolved into ways to track the sections we mentioned during class that I may have missed, sections that struck me as full of depth, notes on the historical context, as well as questions that I want to ask myself on later reads. My annotations have become a roadmap for close reading the novel, with the tabs marking most _{(I ran out of tabs twice)} of the annotations throughout the book.