What do you do in open book exams for English Literature?

Open book seems like an advantage on the surface.

But, when you only have 40 - 45m per essay to:
- annotate,
- make a good plan,
- write 1200 words (3 sides)
- check

you can't be wasting precious time on a goose chase, flipping back and forth through a 300 page book. (also the book won't stay flat so you waste more time trying to keep the pages still)

so what do you do?

Well most of the time you're going to have looked at the best quotes anyway, and annotated them before the exam. The main benefit is that if you get a weird question you can find new quotes relatively quickly, and you don't have to memorise any quotes, much relieving stress.
If you know good annotations you can just quickly flick to that chapter to find the quote (you'll generally be used to where the best ones are by reading the book a lot, saving time and not giving a wild goose chase as you put it), and you can pull up all those annotations you did before. It's also good for getting things like structure which can be hard to remember, etc.

In the end, different people like different things, so some may prepare to memorise while others may prepare to sacrifice a bit of time in order to reduce stress but get more knowledge of annotations and how the actual book works: I think in selecting key quotes you lose what the book is about, which can be problematic when answering different questions.

Obviously these are just my thoughts haha, really it's personal preference. But I always find its just a good idea to practice reading the book, making annotations and then you can quickly find where you want. In the end, a good essay only needs about 5 quotes, so it often doesn't take much time if you have good knowledge of the book. Hope that helps!

an unrelated question - how many times have you gone over each book, on average?

1 for me just for plot comprehension, then i move on.