welcome to the club!

our next read-a-long, plus five close reading materials I love to keep on my desk

Welcome to the Closely Reading Book Club! Here, you’ll find all the chapter guides for the books we read together, as well as other book-club-specific content, like annotation guides to help you develop your close-reading practice with your very own style and aesthetic.

In our club, we read slowly. We relish our time in the pages of an amazing story and we take notes on what we find — from inspiration to favorite quotes to confounding questions.

One of the things I want to talk about within our book club is how to find your own, unique closely reading style, and how to uncover the right environment to help you do closer and closer readings of your chosen texts.

We’ll investigate together: what aesthetics or genres or tools or environments will inspire you to sit with a book and let your ideas blossom? What current reading habits do you have that may be limiting how much you enjoy your reading experience? What kinds of books do you wish you were reading?

We’ll explore all this and more as we continue to read amazing stories together.

Our next read

On Monday, September 9th, we’re kicking off the end of summer and the start of fall with one of my favorite modernist novels: Nella Larsen’s Passing, first published in 1929.

I’ve always thought of the novel as a perfect transition read between the sweltering final days of summer and the creeping cool rains of fall. I don’t want to tell you too much about the novel, at risk of spoiling literally any little bit of it for you, but the basics are this:

Two women reunite after years apart and are both curious and wary of the choices the other has made for herself. As their lives become more and more enmeshed—emotionally, psychologically, and socially—old tensions begin to rise to the surface. The decision to pass as someone, or as some race, other than one’s true identity, becomes the existential tangle of the plot. Can you ever really know someone? Can you become someone else if you pretend at it long enough?

The novel explores these questions and more in some of the most sensuous, gorgeous prose you’ve ever met on the page.

I cannot wait to read it with you!

We’ll be reading the novel more quickly than our usual reads: we’ll get it all done in just 2 weeks! The reason for this? It’s a fast-paced story and it’s not very long. Clocking in at just over 100 pages, Passing is the kind of book that many of you may read in a single sitting.

Don’t worry — we’ll still read very closely and analyze all the details.

Gather your close reading materials

As we get into another closely reading experience together, I thought I’d share my all-time favorite close reading materials.

Please note that none of the materials below are affiliate links; they’re just easy online spots to find these things, with some notes about where you can (probably!) find similar things in your town if you want to shop in-person and/or local.

Item one: a six-inch ruler

There’s nothing like a crisp, clean underline in your books. Especially if you love to re-read your books!

Using a long ruler is too unwieldy for small book pages, so I love these half-sized rulers. You can find them at craft stores, art shops, and I always find the best ones at university bookstores (usually near the drafting materials and graph paper).

• This set, from Amazon, is a great deal and makes it easy to leave a ruler in every book you’re reading at the moment.

• This brand, Helix, is the one I love best. They’re more durable than others I’ve used. I usually find them at art stores.

A persnickety observation: I don’t recommend a small metal ruler because one of two things tends to happen: 1) there is a cork backing on the ruler, which lifts it up and off the page and can cause weird gaps for your pen to leak into; 2) there is not a cork backing, and the metal glides too easily on the paper, making for messier lines.

Item two: a pen that doesn’t bleed

We tend to be so particular about the particulars, when it comes to pens. I find this especially true when it comes to pens we use in our books, because there’s just so much that can go wrong. Ink bleeding through the pages and staining or obscuring the text is simply unacceptable. Pens that make your otherwise lovely handwriting look weird can ruin beautiful pages in books you love. You’ve got to be careful when it comes to selecting the right pen.

Here is a shortlist of my favorites:

• All-time favorite is the Pilot G2. When I’m making lots of underlines in a book, I love using this pen.

• Sakura Micron pens are sooooooo lovely to write with. The thicker tips can bleed through thin pages, but the thinner tips work amazingly well.

• LePen is usually great (just watch your pressure! it can bleed through) — I always see these at art or stationery stores, and even sometimes at craft stores. I love the range of blue and green inks they have.

• Never underestimate the power of a simple, cheap ballpoint pen. I have a box of Papermate 1.0 black pens that I use for everything. (They’re also curiously good at holding up long hair without a hair tie..)

Item three: a rainbow of highlighters

I like to use a combination of pens and highlighters when I’m doing a really intensive close reading.

I know some folks who use highlighters to color-code their observations or to track specific themes (like using yellow to highlight sentences that include evidence or clues, while using blue to highlight mentions of a specific place, in a mystery novel).

I tend to read with a single color, and then on repeat reads, I use a new color — so I can track my changing interests in a certain novel over time. Pretty fun.

• These are my favorite highlighters by a mile!

• In grad school, I got into using colored pencils for a long time. They shade the page so easily, and you have a lot of control over the depth of your highlight. Bonus: they cannot bleed through!

Item four: some kind of bookmark

I used to dog-ear my pages, but I also use dog-ears to mark important pages. This became very confusing over time, especially when I would reread books. So I started using bookmarks: old receipts, pieces of ribbon, a post-it note.

Then my mom started making these adorable bookmarks with heavyweight cardstock, washi tape, vintage magazine cutouts, and mod-podge. The result is a thick, sturdy bookmark that doesn’t wear over time. I *love* it.

Item five: flags or post-it notes

I love to use flags, especially when I’m reading and referencing books I don’t own—ones I’ve borrowed from a professor or the library.

I use flags in a few different ways:

• to mark sections of larger novels (so it’s easy to open to the section you want to reference or read),

• to mark pages with quotes or scenes I love, and (using different color flags) to mark specific topics I’m reading for.

• I also use flags before I start reading, especially in anthologies:

  • I look at the table of contents, then flag the chapters I want to read the most. Pressed for time, I can easily flip to what I’ve marked for myself.

(This last approach is especially helpful for grad school studies!)

During my dissertation-writing phase, I used bright yellow flags to mark the pages in my books where there were explicit mentions of “electric light” or “electricity.” I used hot pink flags to mark pages where there were mentions of sexual desire, lust, or actual sex. This made it really easy, when I was in the middle of a writing session, to look at my shelf and see where I could find my electric or desire references — I just looked for yellow or pink, and I didn’t have to open any of the books to find the right ones I needed for my next section of my chapter.

• These are the flags I typically use

• These look absolutely amazing and I may need to order them…

Caution! There are some flags that use an adhesive that tends to pill or ball-up over time, which can damage book pages. I find that I can tell the difference based on how “tacky” the adhesive feels on my fingers before I place the flag. The actual Post-it brand tends to be the best over long periods of time.

Bonus items: writing outside your books

• Hate writing in your books? Here’s my favorite legal pad to take notes on. And here’s my favorite reading journal.

• This is my favorite writing journal and I prefer the dotted paper! I keep one of these as a “Daily” that I write in almost every day for 10-15 minutes. Sometimes I write about life; sometimes I write my grocery list; sometimes I just doodle. The paper is amazing and after using them for over 5 years now, they’re definitely my go-to. I love the wide range of colors and shops like Barnes & Noble have them on sale very regularly.

Let’s start reading!

I’m so excited to embark on Passing with you.

If you’d like to buy a copy of the novel via my Bookshop page, I’ll receive a commission for the sale. Passing is also usually quite easy to find in used bookshops, and you may find it in a companion volume with Larsen’s other fantastic novel, Quicksand.

Tell me: what are your favorite close reading materials? What are you reaaaaally picky about??

‘Til next time!