We read...

To know we are not alone. ~C.S. Lewis~

Monday, October 26, 2009

Musing Mondays (BIG) 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).>

5 comments:

caite said...

cutting them up....writing in pen....I am feeling faint....

I am not a notetaker. I am a Post-it pointer, using those little post-it flags to mark certain points, some of which actually prove useful and make sense when I look back at them!

Rebecca Johnson said...

I do not know of this 'notebook obsession' of which you speak?

Surely you are not referring to the one (okay five) notebooks in on my bedside table.

And definitely not the two (okay fifteen) notebooks I have stacked up in my to use pile.

I have no idea what you're talking about...

Nise' said...

I am not a note taker while I read but listening to a speaker, radio program, talking on the phone, etc. look out!

Cackleberry Homestead said...

I'm slowly becoming a notetaker and I can definitely identify with Becca's notebook obsession.

I have heard of altered books (as I do scrapbooking) but I haven't tried it out yet. Hey - it's your books - you're allowed to do just what you desire to them!

Zee said...

I do write in books but I balk at writing in pen. I do agree with you about making the books yours. So power to the book writers!