Trying a New Approach to Note-Taking on Books — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho

Assumed audience: People who care about note-taking and are already persuaded that thinking “with” a book via note-taking is helpful and good.

This evening I started rereading Sabrina B. Little’s excellent The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners (which I quoted briefly here a few months ago) with a two-fold purpose: discussing it with my 14-year-old daughter over the summer so she has good reading to accompany her summer running training, and getting a much firmer grasp on the book’s insights. I’ve been mulling some ways that Little’s thesis and framing — that virtue ethics is a particularly helpful lens for thinking about endurance running specifically and endurance sports more generally — may fit into future endeavors of my own. More on that anon, and all this merely by way of setup —

Back in May, Eleanor Konik published 🌲 How to Take Notes on Physical Library Books, and it stuck in my head as a great idea, and far more generally applicable for me than her specific application to library books. The gist is really simple: get a small notebook that “fits” in a book and take notes on that instead of in the book itself. (I’m focused for the rest of this post on that specific bit, but Konik has some very helpful things to say on note-taking per se beyond the question of stationery, so you should give the whole thing a read.) On the one hand, the advice to use a notebook for taking notes on things you read is obvious.1 On the other hand, I have done many variants of this over the years, but always found them lacking.

The notebooks I prefer for my more general note-taking and journaling2 are large enough that I find them unwieldy to take notes on with a book unless I am at my desk. I do much of my reading away from my desk, though. I have also tried taking notes digitally, and I hate it. I like having my notes digitally once I am working on a project that uses those notes, but taking notes digitally is just worse in every way for me than taking them by hand. I have basically just given up on finding a good solution here — given up too easily, it turns out. Konik noticed that if you open an A6 (pocket-sized) notebook vertically (in “portrait” orientation) rather than horizontally (“landscape”), it fits along one page of a normal non-fiction book pretty perfectly:

Konik’s example of her notes (archived here for when — not if — Substack inevitably goes away)<br>Konik mentions that she specifically uses the Bullet Journal Pocket notebook, because it puts the numbers on the pages in such a way that makes it clear that it’s meant to be opened in “portrait mode”. I don’t require that. Indeed, I think I will prefer to be able to switch from vertical to horizontal layout: vertical for the book notes, and the more traditional horizontal open for more extended journaling-style thinking-into-paper. The set of Field Notes memo books a friend gave me a few years ago (thanks, Bryan!) work perfectly for that — and I finally have something to do with them! In the future, once these run out, I’ll switch over to Leuchtturm1917 A6 dot grid journals.

The one additional wrinkle I was thinking about this evening is that I am often reading multiple note-taking-worthy books at once, and I don’t want notes across books intermingled. The solution is pretty simple, though: have more than one notebook available, and always start and finish notes on a given book in a given journal. Once you finish one book, the remainder of that journal is free to use for the next book. I can imagine being annoyed by crossing journal boundaries for a book, so I’ll probably make a point just to start a new journal for a new book if I’m too close to the end of the previous one. Journals like these aren’t very expensive to begin with, and you can often find them pretty good discounts if you watch for them.

So far — one whole evening in — I’m liking this a lot. The main downside I foresee is the need to buy a lot more Leuchtturm1917 A6 dot grid notebooks once these Field Notes journals run out. The horror!

My first journal using this new method

Notes

This only applies for books where I want the notes, of course. Sometimes I know that ahead of time, but with Little’s book, for example, I didn’t. It was only after listening to most of it (while running, of course!) that I realized that I wanted to get it in hard copy and also to take some more substantive notes on it. That’s fine, though. Nothing stops me from starting a collection of notes halfway through a book, after all. I can just go back and fill in the bits I want to keep. ↩︎

A Leuchtturm1917 A5 hardcover dot grid. For work notes, I use a Leuchtturm1917 B5 softcover dot grid instead: I like having more room there. ↩︎

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