Beloved
Digitial illustration created as a companion for an essay titled “Reading ‘Beloved’ with Pen and Purpose.”
I recently pulled Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved off the bookshelf it occupied for many years in my home and cracked the spine with three purposes in mind.

First, I sought to end the Era of the Great Non-Reading of Beloved.

Second, I wanted to symbolically spit in the eye of the plague of book banning.

The third purpose was the most important. I'd just read a Washington Post article1 about the TikTok-fueled trend of bibliophiles annotating their books — underlining favorite quotes, scribbling comments in the margins, indexing key passages and such. Carefully curated annotation kits can now be found on Etsy, and how-to-annotate videos on Instagram. Read more here.