As you read, do you scribble around the edges? Over the years, writers have sworn by the practice. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote: ‘In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion …’

I tend to make notes digitally nowadays. And if I include magazines and newspapers, most of my reading is online, where I probably could annotate with the right software, but can hardly doodle. That’s a shame. Apart from the fact that annotating boosts recall, we’d lose something if freeform margin-writing faded away. One of the meanings of ‘marginalia’ is ‘non-essential’, yet it’s anything but.

For one thing, scribbled-upon books have helped reveal the web of influences between writers and thinkers. Herman Melville’s annotated copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost shows how it fed into Moby-Dick. And Charles Darwin’s comments in his books – from Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature – inform how they shaped his theory.

Marginalia can reveal everyday insights too. Historians occasionally find scrawls in manuscripts that speak of long-dead readers’ lives. A recent exhibition in Dublin features scriptures doodled on by medieval Irish monks. One described feeling ‘ale-killed’ (hungover); another complained about his materials (‘New parchment, bad ink. O I say nothing more’). Turns out nuns did similar. In 2022, researchers found surprisingly modern cartoons of people around the edges of an 8th-century Act of Apostles. A nun etched them, perhaps mischievously.

Reading about these examples made me think I should annotate more – not everything, but the writing I care about. Or perhaps I’ll take a leaf from a wholesome TikTok trend I discovered while writing this: gifting an annotated book. This 21st-century practice suggests digitalisation may not be annotation’s death knell after all. Poe might have approved.

When I’m going through something stressful, I have a strong urge to think out loud about it with someone I trust. There are probably several reasons I end up feeling better: my listener helps me avoid catastrophic thinking, or reminds me that they have my back if things get worse. But another likely reason is that having the chance to describe a difficult situation in detail – even if you’re just describing it to yourself, as in a journal – invites you to see the full picture, and in many cases, it’s not all bad.

Research by Christian Waugh and colleagues at Wake Forest University in North Carolina underscores this and highlights its potential for helping us manage our emotions. They focused largely on people’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on data they collected then. When people reflected on a stressful experience they’d been having, and were prompted to describe six specific elements of the situation, they tended to list at least one that was positive (such as spending more time with family during the pandemic). Having more positive elements in the list was associated with feeling less negative and more positive emotion following the task. Taking some time to elaborate on one of the positive aspects seemed to help people feel better, too.

It can be annoying to be told to ‘look on the bright side’ or ‘find the silver lining’. But personal trials often come with opportunities for growth or self-insight; grief or separation sometimes lead to new connections; and even mundane sources of frustration (a traffic jam, say) can contain small points of pleasure or relief (enjoying a song on the radio that you would’ve missed). Where there are such leavening factors, taking a moment to talk or write about the experience could help us make the most of them.

I usually start the year with the goal of reading more books. But, this year, my goal is to read just one: War and Peace (1869).

Leo Tolstoy’s novel has been on my shelf for years, but lighter and shorter fare has always come between us. ‘I’ll read this one quick, easy novel,’ I think, ‘then I’ll give Tolstoy my full attention.’ Years passed. Until I encountered the idea of the ‘slow read’, via Simon Haisell’s newsletter Footnotes and Tangents. It’s Haisell’s third and final year running an online club for this particular novel, producing podcasts to accompany each week’s reading, and in 2025 his subscriber list has swelled like the ranks of the Napoleonic and Russian armies advancing towards each other, with me among their number.

War and Peace has 361 chapters, most shorter than 10 pages. Having started on 1 January and reading a chapter a day, I can expect to reach the epilogue not long after Christmas. This makes my experience similar to how the earliest version of the story, published in weekly newspaper instalments, was read. Now more than halfway through the year, my sense of time has shifted in response to this routine. The book as an object has become a talisman, a tangible manifestation of how a daily habit can build into a much bigger accomplishment: the growing section of pages in my left hand marking out the year so far; the dwindling section in my right hand showing the year yet to unfold. On the left is what is done and cannot be changed; on the right are possibilities still open, choices yet to be made, days to be filled with activities of my choosing. If this is what I can achieve through an extra 15 minutes of reading a day, what else could I add to my life in a similarly manageable, daily microdose? My guitar calls to me from across the room, and the Duolingo owl hoots softly, menacingly, from my phone.

I was taken aback a few years ago when an article went viral admonishing its readers for sending so many ‘thank you’ emails – we’re all struggling with overflowing inboxes, it claimed, and insisting on replying ‘thank you’ all the time, while polite, just adds to the collective burden. Guilty as charged, I thought at the time.

According to a recent paper, there’s another reason to go easy on your gratitude. In the words of the research team led by Kristin Laurin at the University of British Columbia, saying ‘thank you’ too intensely could have ‘potential negative consequences’ for your ‘impression-management goals’. In short, it could make you seem like less of a boss.

The researchers came to their conclusion after presenting hundreds of participants with examples of exchanges between a helper and a thanker. Some of these were fictional vignettes, others were real-life workplace exchanges. Gratitude expressions ranged from the to-the-point ‘Thanks’ to the much more effusive ‘Thank you so much for taking your time to do this for me. I’m incredibly grateful. You have no idea how much I appreciate it. Thank you again.’

Participants rated more effusive thankers as being lower in status and lower in power (that is, having less control over resources and decision-making), relative to helpers. In the real-world examples, this was specifically the case when the message of thanks dominated, rather than being embedded in a longer message.

Expressing gratitude has many benefits – it helps us all get along, among other things – but Laurin and her team said their work shows being too effusive could have unintended consequences. If you’re an agreeable person but you also have ambitions for getting ahead, it might be worth pausing before expressing your next thankful message.