How I Track and Annotate my Reading

A PhD student’s reading system turns marginalia into searchable knowledge by combining lightweight in-book tabs with a structured Obsidian database. The core idea is simple: mark only the moments worth reusing later—whether for future writing, recommendations, or personal recall—then transcribe those highlights into a dedicated digital notes network so the physical book stays clean and the ideas remain easy to find.

While reading fiction such as Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, she uses tabs selectively rather than tagging every plot beat. Tabs go on passages that could matter later: lines she might reference in a blog post, moments she considers essential to understanding the book, and scenes that strongly land emotionally (like making her laugh hard or feel genuinely excited). She emphasizes that she doesn’t tab “every single thing that happens,” because her current nonfiction and academic interests don’t require that level of granularity. For nonfiction—especially memoir—she tabs a bit more, since those books are more likely to feed into her own future writing. The guiding principle is reuse: if a statement might become useful in another text, it gets captured; if not, the book remains uncluttered.

After finishing a book, all tracking and organization happens inside Obsidian, which she uses to maintain a year-specific reading hub (her example is a “Books in 2022” page). Each completed title is recorded with practical metadata: star rating, author, and consumption details such as whether it was listened to on audio, including hours and the corresponding page count. Every book entry also links to a separate Obsidian page where she stores a summary, overall thoughts, and any quotes or ideas she highlighted during reading.

The most distinctive feature is her internal linking strategy. In her Murakami notes, she creates “backlinks” between ideas: one note might capture a writerly principle (for instance, a suggestion to stop working when you’re in the middle of something), and clicking through reveals the supporting quote and the context. This turns isolated reading notes into a web of connected concepts across her Obsidian folder. For books that don’t require cross-referencing, she keeps things lighter—sometimes just a summary page with no internal links.

When she can’t immediately transcribe tabs into her computer, she uses a simple workaround: cue cards and a pen. She writes the intended note for each tabbed moment, removes the sticky tabs from the book, and later transfers everything into Obsidian. She contrasts this with an earlier approach—heavy underlining and highlighting in academic books that became so messy she couldn’t track what mattered. Her current preference is to preserve books as tidy, lendable artifacts while relying on Obsidian for long-term retrieval and organization of her thinking.

The system ultimately supports both memory and future production: it helps her remember what she read, quickly retrieve reusable ideas, and maintain a clean physical library without losing the intellectual trail.