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Sara | bookworm

@annotatewithsara

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The sweet gum pods fell from the tree during the windstorm on Saturday. I picked them up and put them on page 22 of Kin so that I could show you the connected imagery of the seed pods and the quarters in the novel. You’ll want to stop reading now if you haven’t finished Kin. If you have, keep reading and I’ll tell you what pages to revisit so you can notice the imagery that is paired and repeated in two connected scenes how we are meant to look at the two moments side-by-side.

Chapter 2 p 22
Annie’s mom comes into town and leaves 3 quarters at the bar while Annie sits underneath an American sweet gum tree with seedpods strewn around her uncollected. They’re prickly, like the knowledge that your estranged mother came to town and didn’t come to see you.

Chapter 40 p 328
Annie’s mom comes into town and leaves 3 quarters at the bar while Annie sits there. Her mother came to see her. Unlike the cuckabugs strewn around her on p 22, Annie collects these quarters. They’re “warm from her [mother’s] touch.”

ID: 9 second video of an open book with quarters and American sweet gum pods on the pages taken from various angles. Sometimes the book is closed. The book is Kin by Tayari Jones.

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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4 hours ago

My friend sent me a Jane Eyre post card. I was delighted to get it! Before I tuck it away for safekeeping, I got out all my Jane Eyre stuff because I want to show you all my Jane Eyre stuff!

There’s Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - the @penguinclassics edition.

I’ve also got a bookmark that I made featuring a Table of Contents for Jane Eyre because I like to have a Table of Contents, and books just don’t have those very often nowadays. My personal design includes both Roman Numerals and Arabic Numerals because I find that handy, especially when getting to Chapters XXIX-XXXVIII.

Also, in my Jane collection, the inimitable Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. My new Jane Eyre comic strip postcard from @butibroughtbooks will live as a bookmark in my copy of Wide Sargasso Sea btw!

Last but not least, Escaping Mr. Rochester by L.L. McKinney, a YA reimagining of Jane Eyre where Thornfield Hall is in New Orleans. It features Black queer characters, and in this story, the romance is between Jane and Bertha, and Mr. Rochester is unquestionably a villain.

ID. [1] Three books, postcards, and a bookmark arranged on a faux wood surface. [2] a table of contents for Jane Eyre formatted as a bookmark. [3] A comic strip postcard about Jane Eyre.

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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3 days ago

I have been waiting a whole month for the magnolia pod on this tree to ripen so I could experience a quote from Kin by Tayari Jones. Now I’m sharing the pod and the quote with you.

“As I turned the spiky cone in my palm, it seemed significant. Each seed, jewel red, nestled in its own nook, tethered by a delicate cord.” -Ch 17, p 152

I really love how the second sentence in that quote has several small clauses enclosed in commas. It makes the sentence feel like a magnolia pod. The clauses are the “seeds.” The commas enclosing them make the “nooks.”

ID: 11 second video with music by Allison Russell of a magnolia seed pod with the seeds dangling and text overlay that says “imagery from Kin by Tayari Jones, chapter 17 Vernice p 152.” At the end of the video, there is an image overlay with the quote from the book typed up.

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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4 days ago

I wrote blog post about Nora, the main the main character of Book Lovers by Emily Henry, who bothered me because of how she romanticizes Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights. She does this by envisioning Charlie, her love interest, as the Wuthering Heights anti-hero Heathcliff. She indulges in describing Charlie with the tall, dark, and handsome allure of Heathcliff’s physicality and personality (he is a quintessential Byronic anti-hero), while omitting how this same character was met with discrimination, dehumanization, and scapegoating for being tall, not white, and handsome. In the process, she uses dehumanizing language to describe Charlie too.

As a powerful white woman in publishing and an educated and accomplished reader, I expected Nora at some point to notice her own problematic language patterns toward Charlie. I expected her to contend with (or at least think about critically one time) Wuthering Height’s themes of racism and ethnic discrimination and how they affect Heathcliff. Lastly, I expected her to acknowledge that she was indulging in the cliche of romanticizing Wuthering Heights even though she is fully aware of the book’s plot and themes.

Since Nora doesn’t do any of the above in Book Lovers, I began to read her character with a certain suspicion: that she might be a white woman in America who willfully ignores racial identity politics and racial privilege.

My blog post covers all this with text evidence and is available at www.annotatewithsara.com or from the link in my bio.

Thank you to those who talked through and read this post with me when I was drafting it. Your feedback and critical eye was so appreciated. 🫶🏻💗🫶🏻

ID: two infographics with screen shots from a blog post about Emily Henry’s novel Book Lovers with text overlays that say, “NEW BLOG POST” “Did Emily Henry create Nora with the publishing industry’s lack of DEI in mind?” “critical of Nora’s character, not Emily Henry, Byronic Hero & Wuthering Heights allusions discussed, text evidence included, primarily in the footnotes“

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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4 days ago

Close reading the color red is a fascinating way to engage with the bleak, wintry novella Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. The color itself infuses the text, coming up over 40 times in 99 pages.

Did you know Toni Morrison forever changed the way I read colors in novels? In A Source of Self Regard, these words by her altered my eye for color, expanding what I previously thought color could do in books:
“[...] palette, or color, is one of the last and most crucial of my decisions in developing a text. I don’t use color to “prettify” or please, or provide atmospherics, but to imply and delineate the themes within the narrative. Color says something directly or metaphorically.”
- Toni Morrison, “God’s Language”: Moody Lecture, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, May 10, 1996.

Her words made me question the color fixation of Ethan Frome’s narrator, an engineer visiting Starkfield, Massachusetts to work at a power plant. He is responsible for all the mentions of red. All 40+ details about a beating heart, a tongue, veins, blood, crimson ribbons, and broken red glass comes from his particular sense of drama and intrigue. Why was this man seeing so much red???

This is what led me down the red rabbit hole in Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and what propelled me to create an annotating guide for all the red in the novella. That guide is now up on my Etsy for $1.50. It’s 20 pages, and it walks you through annotating each mention of red in the Penguin Classics Edition of Ethan Frome.

ID: a black and white image of Edith Wharton with text overlay and pages of a PDF annotating guide arranged haphazardly below her.

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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5 days ago

Oh how I would like to get my hands on Esther Yi’s second book To God (a collection of stories) that came out today!

I read and annotated Y/N, her debut, a couple years ago AND LOVED IT. In the video, I’m flipping through my annotations for Y/N. There are copious amounts of them because Y/N put my brain through the wringer in the best way.

P.S. I snagged this UK copy in an international airport a couples years ago. I was so excited to get this version!

ID: 12 second video of Y/N on a sunny blanket with text overlay that reads, “Do you know what I heard? Her second book came out today!”

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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6 days ago

Audition by Katie Kitamura. I have a hunch about the structure. Each chapter is written to be a sip.

Why I think that:
There’s a lot of coffee and drinks in this book and a lot of sipping takes place. That was my first clue.

Secondly, I marked all 13 chapters with a tab, which made something immediately clear: the chapters are equally small. They are perfectly even, measured out and doled out to us like little sips of story.

ID: 13 second compilation video of me holding a paperback book in a cafe during the day with text overlay. All text is repeated in the main caption above.

#annotatewithsara
@riverheadbooks by @annotatewithsara

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10 days ago

Want to see how I annotate a poem?
The poem is WHILE READING SULA by Phillip B. Williams. You can read the 2024 version of his poem on the Poetry Foundation’s websie (as it was publishing in Poetry magazine) or the 2026 version in Williams’ collection LIFT EVERY VOICE.

First off, I noted the poem’s 2024 to 2026 evolution. Willliams made two changes. The word born is now borne, and a em dash replaces a comma.

The poem pulls imagery straight from Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. So, of course, I went into that text looking for quotes! Here are the Sula quotes that informed my poem reading:

"It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow."
- Toni Morrison in Sula (Ch 1965, p 174)

"...the meaning of the birthmark over her eye; it was not a stemmed rose, or a snake, it was Hannah’s ashes marking her from the very beginning."
- Toni Morrison in Sula (Ch 1939, p 114)

What I highlighted as “straight from Sula” imagery in the poem: “I realized I was Nel and wept” + “I had not borne snakes / or roses made of cinders.” + “ashen” + “Why should I burn” + the em dashes in the last line.

Next, I annotated the poems vertical language: “rose” + “beneath” + above.”
Vertical language is super important in Sula too. Think of Nel’s “circles and circles of sorrow” and “The Bottom”

Sula and Nel are a pair. So, I thought it was really cool that most of the lines in William’s poem had sound pairs: I + I, RO + RO, ROSE + ROSE, EN + EN, RE TO + RE TO, UZ + UZ, and two silences made by the em dashes in the last line.

ID: 9 infographics with a consistent color theme: red, white, black, grey and yellow. Each infographic has an image of Phillip B. Williams’ poem “WHILE READING SULA” with various annotations. All the annotations are described in the main caption and in the pinned comment below. (cont'd in comment section)

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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18 days ago

So, I really like this app, and I love a deal. I have used Fetch for a couple of years to scan my everyday receipts. Which gives me points. Which I convert to gift cards. The result is a free book every once in a while since I usually convert my points to a Barnes & Noble gift card.

The app is called Fetch. If you decide to sign up, let me know! P.S. This is not sponsored or an ad. I just want you to know you can get some $$$ by scanning receipts into an app. If you use my referral code when you sign up, you’ll automatically get 2000 points (which converts to $2 at Barnes & Noble but can also be converted to a Visa gift card or a gift card to a bunch of other places—point conversion rates really vary!)

ID: 20 second video of me showing books and puzzle cube, a screen shot of points I’ve cashed in on the Fetch app, and a screen shot of my referral code from the app’s referral program.

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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20 days ago

Sula in Poems⬇️

I have two poetry collections on my shelf with poems that reference Toni Morrison’s second novel Sula, and I treasure them because books being in direct conversation with other books has long been one of my favorite things about reading. Allusions. References. Reminders. Echoes. I love that stuff.

The Poems & The Collections
“While Reading Sula” by Phillip B. Williams on page 14 of LIFT EVERY VOICE
@penguinbooks

“Modern Poetry” by Diane Seuss
on page 13 (final stanza) of MODERN POETRY
@graywolfpress

ID: 17 second nearly silent video of me cycling through a stack of three books on a green ottoman with text overlay that’s included in full in the main caption above

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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21 days ago

Last year, I started noticing wilderness metaphors everywhere, and I’ve been recording my observations.

I wrote a blog post highlighting wilderness metaphors and quotes in these books, short stories, and poems:

The Origins of Others by TONI MORRISON
The Wilderness, a novel by ANGELA FLOURNOY
A Mercy a novel by TONI MORRISON
The Book of Delights an essay collection by ROSS GAY
“Wilderness,” a poem by CARL SANDBURG
“Come Out The Wilderness,” a short story by JAMES BALDWIN
“Wilderness Lost” a poem by MAY SARTON
The Book of Chuck, a novel by LATOYA WATKINS

Wilderness metaphors explore the vastness of human emotion, particularly the vastness of feelings like grief, loneliness, and sorrow.

My favorite wilderness metaphor comes from
Toni Morrison in
The Origin of Others:

“Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.”

You can read my post at:
www.annotatewithsara.com

ID: wilderness images with text overlay and book covers explaining my blog post about wilderness metaphors. All text and information is repeated in the main caption above.

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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a month ago

Eve L. Ewing announced a new poetry collection yesterday (thanks to @blackgirlthatreads and @lit_erally_obsessed for posting on Threads about this news!) and I just want to remind everyone that there is a YA epistolary novel that I really love with Eve L. Ewing references, and it’s called Love in 280 Characters or Less by Ravynn K. Stringfield. In the novel, the main character reads Eve L. Ewing comics and poetry for the first time as a college freshman. The book is so tender and fun to read, and the Ewing references are like more icing on top of the cake.

ID: (1) books on a faux wood surface with text overlay and screen shot of a new book announcement called The Best Poem (coming out March 2, 2027). All text is repeated in the main caption above. (2) A page from the epistolary novel Love in 280 Characters or Less by Ravynn K. Stringfield that shows text messages.

#annotatewithsara by @annotatewithsara

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a month ago