This post has since been reposted by Thought Catalog.
- Favorite quotes
- Gorgeous prose
- Bad prose
- Lines that make you laugh
- and cry
- Lines you wish you had written
- Scenes that make you wonder how the hell this book got so popular
- Place names
- Character names
- Obscure words (the word for a collector of words is sesquipedalian)
- Words you derive the meaning of from their context
- Moments when you know what will happen next
- Moments where you thought you knew and were surprised
- Moments that made you put the book down
- Where you were, who you were with, what was going on around you while you were reading (See Proust, Swan’s Way)
- Recommended further reading.
- Settings
- Drinks mentioned
- Drugs mentioned
- Number of drinks taken (This has been done by readers of The Sun Also Rises, and in a British Medical Journal study of the James Bond novels and films.)
- Bad sex scenes. (The Literary Review puts out an award every year for bad sex in fiction.)
- Language that just wouldn’t fly today (again, see Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.
- Lines that will make you sound smart.
- Feelings you’ve had your whole life you’re only just finding the words for in someone else’s work
- Words of comfort
- Words that disturb
- Words a good friend needs to hear right now
- Moments that make you say “I could have thought of that”
- References to historical/ current events. (I recently found a scene in Watchmen based on an obscure and brutal prison riot in New Mexico, the details of which I DO NOT recommend Googling.)
- References to other works of literature and art
- Outright theft of other works of art
- The sources of later references
- Parallels and cross pollination to other stuff you’re reading
- Moments that make you see the limits of verbal storytelling
- and moments that make you believe there are no limits
- Questions for the author
- Questions for a character
- Questions for yourself, the reader
- Food mentioned
- Brand names
- Celebrities and historical figures name-dropped
- Scenes that were better/ worse in the movie
- What you liked
- What you hated
- Notes on an impossible sequel
- Who you’d cast in the movie
- Life lessons
- Songs mentioned
- Books mentioned
- Number of times a given word appears (David Foster Wallace does a hilarious take-down of John Updike in which compares the number of words devoted to the description of a golf course to the very few words describing the end of the world for which the course is a metaphor.)
This post started as a brainstorming session with The Imperfectionist.