A reading journal for the books that leave a mark on you. The wide column on the left is where I think out loud; the narrow margin on the right is where the page numbers, second thoughts and lines worth keeping are allowed to gather.
On reading with a pencil
I read slowly, and badly, unless there is a pencil in my hand. Underlining is how I argue with a book. A sentence I love gets a line beneath it; a sentence I doubt gets a question mark in the margin; a page worth returning to gets its number copied out here, where I can find it again without hunting.
A book is a conversation, and the margin is the only place where you get to reply.
This page keeps three kinds of note. A page number marks a passage. A quote is something I want to hear again. A side comment is just me, talking back. They live in the rail to the right so the main column stays clean and easy to read — the way a good page of print should be.
What I read this month
Three books, three different weights. A novel I could not put down, an essay collection I read one piece at a time, and a handbook that has already earned its dog-eared corners.
- The Salt Path read in four days
- Upstream one essay at a time
- Bird by Bird kept by the desk
How to use this template
Everything here is plain HTML and one stylesheet. Open index.html in Notepad and type over the words. Open style.css to change the colours, the fonts and the two columns. Every block of CSS has a short comment above it, and the section marked THE TWO COLUMNS explains how the wide article and the narrow right margin sit side by side. On a phone they stack neatly, which is handled at the bottom of the file.
On keeping a commonplace book
A notebook is not a diary; it does not care what day it is. It only cares that a line was worth saving. Copy the line down, add the page, and move on. In ten years the pages will be worth more than the books that filled them.