I keep a commonplace book because I want to keep track of the best articles and books I read. A commonplace book is like a “thinker’s journal” that serves as a focused act of self-reflection and way…
I have a new obsession: commonplace books! source I accidentally stumbled upon them while researching Morning Pages. And I'm in love! What are commonplace books? I'm so happy that you asked! source A commonplace book is a personal compilation of knowledge, ideas, quotations, and observations collected by an individual. It is a notebook or journal where one gathers and organizes information from various sources for future reference and reflection. They are more like a database than a diary. In the past many people used commonplace books as a way to order their ideas and make them easy to refer back...
For some individuals, it’s merely a book of quotes they want to remember and draw upon later.
A repository for a personal collection of quotations, scraps, pensées, and poems, this compilation offers keen insight into the influences and inspirations of a writer, namely Elizabeth Smither. There are no platitudes or sententious maxims here; instead, these sometimes pensive sometimes screamingly funny quotations range from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to Elizabeth Bennet, from Charles Simic to Montaigne, and from Monty Python to Henry James. Witty and intriguing, this record also demonstrates the results of the creative process by including Smither's own work.
A commonplace journal is not complicated and doesn't need to be fancy. It is simply a place where notes and quotes from our reading are kept. The simpler
Facebook Twitter Pinterest First of all, what is a commonplace book? A commonplace book is a notebook (or other resource) that is used to record ideas, facts, quotes, and personal responses to information encountered while reading, studying, or just going about your daily life. You can use it to record anything,from that deep, inspirational quote […]
Commonplacing was once a verb that referred to the process of copying out and managing selections from one’s reading. In antiquity the practice originated in loci communes, or “common places,” under...
November 2015 Procedures of Encounter, or, My Commonplace Log Practice Several years ago I was in a small specialty bookstore and came upon a book with mostly blank pages simply called A Little Com…
moleskine notebooks aren't nearly as cool or well-made as they are given credit for. Here is a list of American-made and recycled paper notebooks that do good and look good at the same time.
As the New Year begins, the commonplace book tradition is alive and well, at least as well as any tradition can be that has lived as long and through as many centuries as it has. Nancy Kelly writes a beautiful blog on the importance of commonplacing and some of its historical antecedents on her blog, Sage Parnassus. A friend who introduced me to the commonplace book tradition and I am sure has read every book in the New York Public Library sends me a passage from Willard Randall’s Ethan Allen: His Life and Times. (I guess this is one she hadn’t got around to yet.) “In my youth I was much disposed to contemplation…I committed to manuscript such sentiments or arguments, as appeared most consonant to reason, lest through the debility of memory my improvement should have been less gradual. This method of scribbling I practiced for many years, from which I experienced great advantages in the progression of learning and knowledge…of grammar and language, as well as the art of reasoning…” In a 19th Century American Literature class at St. Mary’s College in California, Professor Barry Horwitz requires his students write in their online commonplace book during each class period. They are instructed that each entry should include at least three quotations they found significant from the class readings. He tells the students to choose passages that offer a powerful statement or one that helps to understand the text or that makes a strong impression, say one you disagree with or one that rings true to your life. As the term progresses, each student’s commonplace book is posted on the class website. An example of those from one class of twenty-eight students is shown here. Have a look--each one is distinctive, annotated thoughtfully, with attractive themes. Periodically, “The Berkeley Daily Planet” publishes Dorothy Bryant’s annotated diary of the passages she adds to her commonplace book. Here is her latest: “He who despairs because of the news is a coward, but he who sees hope in the human condition is mad.” Albert Camus, 1943, occupied France. Bryant comments: “Camus wrote that sentence in his journal as he began dangerous underground work in France against the occupying Nazis. Under these conditions, his terse statement sounds like one of those dark jokes one makes in order to ease tension when engaged in activities that may bring capture, torture, and death at any moment. Today, in more “ordinary” times, this statement seems merely an echo of our passing thoughts as we scan the daily news in print or on TV. Do we ever pat ourselves on the back for maintaining this heroic balancing act? We should. Happy Holidays. The “American Scholar” continues its practice of including a commonplace book section at the end of each issue. It does so by collecting notable quotations on a single theme in a two-page spread without comment or annotation. Fear was the theme of the Winter 2012 issue. “Fear is the basic condition…the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live win a way that we’re not terrified all the time.” David Foster Wallace “I begin to believe in only one civilizing influence—the discover one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that War shall mean annihilation and men’s fears shall force them to keep the peace. Wilkie Collins. Here are a couple on Fear from my commonplace book: “Is it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? ….Why else do we hold on to all these broken marriages, false friendships, boring birthday parties? What would happen if we refused all that, put an end to the skulking blackmail and stood on our own?” Pascal Mercier “…sometimes seeing one’s fears written down, seeing them articulated, can reduce their efficacy. I don’t mean that having them before you on a piece of paper causes them to evaporate, but it can lessen their potency.” Elliot Perlman
A commonplace book is a great way to record great quotes from books your reading. If you'd like to improve your copiousness, try a commonplace book.
In this week’s Monday Times there was an article headlined, “Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins.” At once I shifted into high gear and read it with deep concentration, roused from the Net-induced fragmented thinking that has swept over me lately. The article written by Dirk Johnson bemoans the end of the fine art of scribbling marks in the margin that he believes electronic readers are bound to lead to. The concern he describes is almost exclusively among literary scholars who will be at a loss once they are no longer able to glean the insights revealed by the notes writers have made in the books read they’ve read. How they do this has always been a mystery to me It is almost uniformly believed that e-readers will put an end to this practice to the extent that notable writers read with these gadgets. However, according to G. Thomas Tansville, “People will always find a way to annotate electronically. But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved.” The article cites the work of Heather Jackson who has written several books on the significance of the marginalia found in books. She believes these margin notes have considerable historical meaning and reveal “a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.” I confess, I have read Jackson’s books and have yet to be persuaded. But it seems to me the issue extends well beyond the preservation of marginalia for scholarly research. The issue concerns the very nature of reading itself and the degree to which a reader becomes engaged with the text. It is clearly expressed by Studs Terkel, the oral historian, who is quoted in the Times article as admonishing “a friend who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.” Most engaged readers read slowly as they stop to consider a sentence or an idea and sometimes put a note in the margin or highlight a passage to indicate this. And some of them will collect these passages and preserve them in what has traditionally come to be known as a commonplace book. Not many contemporary readers do this. But it wasn’t so long ago that it was the norm, when readers wrote on the pages of the text what they thought about it and collected their reflections in a notebook. They might have read in a more disjointed fashion, skipping from one book to another to let their thoughts settle in or spend time annotating the material in order to make some sense of it. This might have been the golden age of reading, the period that reached its peak during the Renaissance but is largely extinct now. What we have lost is not only the marginalia of celebrity readers but also the practice of engaged reading itself. For some individuals the art of reading, as David Ulin, points out in his recent book The Lost Art of Reading is an “act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read…but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.” It’s a matter of becoming involved in the text and thinking about it and while that is sometimes a time-consuming process, it is made a little easier by putting your thoughts down on the page so you can recapture them later. Reading a book may take days or weeks, but that is sometimes only the beginning of thinking about it. Collecting marginal notes in a commonplace book enables you to keep the reading experience alive and make the most of its lingering after effects.
Most of us have seen enough memes out there that they might feel commonplace. So it’s good to be reminded just how evocative and downright strange memes are as a form of entertainment, expression, and communication.
In this standalone mystery set in the world of the New York Times bestselling Greenglass House by an Edgar Award–winning author, a group of strangers trapped in an otherworldly inn slowly reveal their secrets, proving that nothing is what it seems and there's always more than one side to the story. The rain hasn't stopped for a week, and the twelve guests of the Blue Vein Tavern are trapped by flooded roads and the rising Skidwrack River. Among them are a ship’s captain, tattooed twins, a musician, and a young girl traveling on her own. To pass the time, they begin to tell stories—each a different type of folklore—that eventually reveal more about their own secrets than they intended. As the rain continues to pour down—an uncanny, unnatural amount of rain—the guests begin to realize that the entire city is in danger, and not just from the flood. But they have only their stories, and one another, to save them. Will it be enough? "Will dazzle seasoned Milford fans and kindle new ones." (Publishers Weekly starred review)
I've mentioned my beloved Commonplace Book many times- I love that thing. I think I could lose my wallet and be less stressed than if I lost my Commonplace. I don't do it in any wonderful way- it's just a place where I collect notes and thoughts and quotes and such. Commonplace books aren't anything
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There are many different ways to structure a commonplace book, but here I will discuss one of the most popular methods: the “Jenny Rallens Method.” Take the parts you like, and leave ou…