On Taking Notes on Books

One way of cataloging notes on books you've read (image link)

 

Austin Kleon directed my attention to Mandy Brown's great website A Working Library.  The website is a collection of her notes and reviews of books.  

In the "About" section of the blog, she describes her rationale for creating the blog... one that I appreciate and empathize with!

I began this site in 2008 in an effort to bring some structure to a long held habit: taking notes about the books I read in a seemingly endless number of notebooks, which then piled up, never to be opened again. I thought a website would make that habit more fruitful and fun, serving as a reference, something the notebooks never did. It did that handily, and more, including making space for me to write and think about adjacent things.

Why it's so great is how it's organized.  Click on the "Reading" tab and you'll see covers of all the books she's read and taken notes on.  Click on any single book in this tab to discover both an overall summary of the book that she wrote but also "reading notes."  Reading notes are not just a list of all the notes that she's taken on a single book, but a short essay about some specific topic the book deals with.  For instance, in her book notes for "Down Girl," she makes a book note about one specific clarification the author makes about sexism and misogyny and another about another specific point -- how in the English language men and women are often split into two camps - givers and takers.  

On the "Reading" tab there are also a list of "Collections" of types of books she's made a record of. 

It's not surprising that Brown has also has thought about how and why we should read and write every day.  It reads like a bullet-pointed manifesto.