I love books. I love reading. And I love talking and writing about both.
I worked in the books business for more than 20 years, ranging from book-selling in local stores, to buying books for an internet retailer, to starting and running a publishing group. When I quit that world to a completely different kind of work, I was afraid I would lose my reading life. I was surprised to find I’m reading and enjoying books now more than ever. I read a little bit of everything but I am especially fond of memoirs, contemporary fiction, nature writing, books about art and the making of it, a little bit of poetry, and a lot of what was once called business life books. I also love graphic novels and young adult novels.
One of my many creative obsessions is commonplace books. A commonplace book is a collection of knowledge. It’s a journal filled with everything from quotations, observations, and citations to formulas, facts, and figures–anything that’s worth remembering from anything one has read, heard, or seen. In a way it is a scrapbook, commemorating and keeping track of the things we have learned and the places we have been, figuratively or literally, via the media that passes through our lives: books, articles, poems, movies, songs, blogs, and so on. Commonplace books are kept by readers, writers, scholars, and students of schools and of life.
I’ve tried making a commonplace notebook dozens of times. While I love drawing or painting the covers of books I’ve read and making notes about characters and quotes, I could never get over the fact that they were so dispersed — it seemed like once I wrote something down I would likely never see it again. I have dozens of notebooks.
For the past decade I’ve been keeping a digital commonplace book. First in Evernote, and then in Apple Notes, and recently I’ve been playing with making a little app here that stores them all on this site, is searchable, and will even serve up a random quote for inspiration. It’s still a work in progress, but feel free to play with it here if you’re interested. I’d love to know what you think.
vgriff 