All my life, I’ve turned down the page at the corner of the book I’m reading whenever a passage of writing strikes me in some particular way: as writing itself, or because it confirms or disputes some ongoing argument I’m having with myself. The gesture is vestigial, the first step in highlighting or underlining, annotating or footnoting. But the endnotes never come.
Often on re-reading a book I reencounter old dog ears. Most of the time I can tell what I was trying to save. In some books the dog ears come thick and fast, even overlapping at times.
I think now when I finish reading a book or when I pick up an old favorite, I might just comb through the dog ears, find the intended passages and post them in a new “dog ears” category in my personal blog.