Musing Monday is hosted by Becca of Just One More Page. Pop over and read lots of interesting comments & post your own. This week Book-note Becca asks...Do you take notes while reading – either for your reviews or for yourself? How/where do you make these notes (on the page, post-its, scrap paper, notebooks etc)?

Becca she doesn't take many notes now but I don't believe her. Let me tell you she is never without a note book, is totally addicted to buying them and cannot resist the urge to ‘write it down’ while she thinks of it so I’m a little sceptical about ‘just stick in a post-it for any interesting passages to come back to later.’

That said I’m hopeless at note taking. Becca will tell you that I take notes in margins, in any blank spaces on the cover or the fly page and much to Becca’s chagrin I do it in pen. As my recent vandalism of books with a knife shows I am not at all precious about books which comes as a surprise to me because I thought I was.

I do love them passionately but I also am happy to make them mine with notes, tearing them into sections or altering them and I suppose this is where my dishonouring of the book as a distinct entity began. Altered books is a derivation of scrapbooking that I have grown to love. Once you’ve given a book new life by altering it you never look at the same way. The fist one I did was rescued from a reject bin at reverse garbage. It was a beautiful Catholic prayer book with rice paper pages and guilt edging. I remade it into a keepsake for a friends 40th. The first time I cut into those beautiful pages I went weak at the knees but the end result was a new lease on life for a book too beautiful to recycle to pulp.

Books should be living things. Notes, artistic rendering, inscriptions only increase the living of a book I say go for it ...note it up! (maybe not so much of the cutting into pieces though I may not do that ever again).>