--- title: Away from Annotating date: 2026-07-06 tag: meta words: 1400 status: done --- # Away from Annotating ### Why I'm allowing myself to read without a pen Garrett Kincaid | Jul 06, 2026 *** ![Photo of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain out on a hike](/assets/cover_TheLivingMountain.jpg) {% caption "It took me three months to read Nan Shepherd's *The Living Mountain*, which is a 30,000-word book (~130 pages). Really, I read it twice or thrice in those three months, by re-reading two or three paragraphs at a time as I underlined and annotated. I read deeply and studied her sentences and word-choices, awed by her observations. I cherished this book and made a point of reading it outside. There are only two things I would change about my experience with Shepherd's “classic of nature writing”: read it within one month rather than three, and pair it with other read-only books so that my slow-going wouldn't prevent me from keeping up a habit of reading books daily." %} *** Ever since editing became my job, I have found it harder to read for leisure. My default mode is editing-mode,[^1] which means reading with a pen and commenting in the margins on things like subtext and paragraph transitions and internal rhyme and clever inversions of S–V–O sentence-structure. When I read this way, both engaging with the content and studying the craft, I probably average three or more minutes per page. At that rate, it takes me about 15 hours to read a 300-page book. And I never skim; if I finish a book, I have read every word on my way from cover to cover. That's how I love to read. That's how books stick with me and how they come to morph my mind. I don't want to change that, but as a writer, editor, and self-publisher, I need to be reading more books, turning more pages. To that end, I have an idea. [^1]: Which happens to double as writer-apprentice mode. Rather than examining a book looking for was to improve it, as I normally do when I edit, this reading-mode is the same method for a different purpose: examine a piece of writing looking for how I can improve *my* writing. This is a case where a framework may actually help change my behavior. I've tried various things in the past to get myself to read more, but this approach seems aligned with my creativity and not some trick I'm playing on myself. Here are the two parts of the framework: books I *study* and books I *read*. I only finished about ten books in 2025, and that felt like way too few, yet I cherished all of those books, studied them, and they helped me dramatically improve my own craft in that time. Rather than chastise myself for my reading volume, as I was doing, maybe I can give myself grace and learn something about how my mind works. Maybe ten to twelve books per year is my upper limit for the number of books I can *study*, meaning the limit of books to which I can apply my scrupulous editor's eye to every sentence and every page and learn from the content while dissecting the author's craft. Here's the rub: I finish books maybe five- to ten-times faster when I don't annotate.[^2] [^2]: At that "read-only" pace, I still comprehend the content and can still comment on and learn from the craft. My commentary is just at the book-level rather than the sentence-level, the way I do my write-ups after watching a film.) So, my plan is to allow myself to read without a pen more often, even for the majority of the books I read.[^3] Still, I need deadlines and a plan and some structure. [^3]: This feels blasphemous to write, given the rules I've set for myself in the past about annotating *every* book I read. My idea, which I will try out starting July 1, is to study one book and read at least one other book per month. This imposes the type of structure and deadlines and goals that aid habit-building while allowing ample space for more leisurely reading. This whole strategy is a response to the fact that I am not always in the mood to study-read, especially if I'm coming off of a bunch of editing or writing. Study-reading is not even a type of energy I have every day. But I want to be reading every day. Even at my three-minute pace, I could study-read a 300-page book every month if I only just averaged 30 minutes of reading per day. That's doable. What I really want is to read one to two hours per day, so when I don't have the energy to study-read, I should still pick up a book (rather than refresh YouTube), just not my pen. I will slowly build an association between reading and pleasure—not only the pleasure that comes from learning but also from the reading itself—and that will be magical. There's one last critical piece of the puzzle, which is that for every book I read, whether I study it or not, I will write a "Book Notes" page for it (and publish on my site), which will double as a review of the book's quality and my interpretation and integration of its content. The only difference between the study-read Book Notes and the leisure-read Book Notes entires will be that the former will have more direct quotes and commentary on the writer's style and skill. For the leisure-reads, I will still comment on the structure and style and the quality but just not at the same depth and detail. So, the desired outcome is this: Read one study-book per month, chosen from a careful list authors I admire and want to emulate (e.g., Annie Dillard, Robert Macfarlane, David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges) who are writing in genres/forms that I want to focus on: essays, narrative nonfiction, short fiction, and prose-poetry. Then, each month, I will also read at least one other book of any length and genre for leisure, without my pen (picking it up whenever I have the urge to read but not the urge to study). I will select these leisure-reads as *books* that interest me (rather than *authors* I explicitly want to emulate). My leisure-reads will be how I achieve breadth, whereas the study-reads will continue to lend depth. I expect to find this approach liberating and energizing. Consider this: I love David Foster Wallace, but I don't own *Infinite Jest* or any of his short story collections, only his essay collections. That's because I write essays, and I want to study his essays. If I allowed myself to read DFW without annotating, maybe I would read *Infinite Jest*, and maybe it would change my life. But the idea of spending 50+ hours study-reading *Infinite Jest* is the reason I have never picked it up. The leisure-reads are also low-commitment; I don't have to finish them. I should be picking books up, putting many down, finishing the ones I enjoy, then picking up another, whereas I ought to read every study-book from start to finish, for the sake of becoming better at my craft (as the priority, with the book's content being secondary). I've never read *Moby Dick*—for crying out loud!—because I imagine myself stopping immediately after the first sentence to remark in the margin about why that famous first line—"Call me Ishmael"—works so well.[^4] [^4]: The cover photo of *The Living Mountain* was taken at the end of a short hike right in the town of Blowing Rock, NC, in front of Glen Burney Falls. I set out from car with my book and pen in hand, thinking I would walk in the park and find a bench or go grab a bite and read outside, but then I stumbled upon a trailhead a few blocks away from downtown and followed it to the end, book and pen in hand. It was a joyous effect of aimlessness; it led me to stop along the trail at scenic spots to read. I completed one chapter over the course of this 3.5-mile round-trip hike. {% subscribe header="", subheader="If you'd like to be notified of the upcoming Book Notes posts and my other writing, subscribe to The Intronaut." %}