monday, august 01, 2005
Thirty books in fourteen pages
This past Christmas, my mom gave me a moleskine and a Fisher space pen. HERE’S A PICTURE OF MY CAT. I mean, once I held the little notebook, I realized I had to fill it up somehow; normal moleskine things wouldn’t work. Sketches were out - I draw about twice a year and enjoy it both times. Written thoughts get typed into TextEdit. To-do lists go on index cards (groan). I had another idea.
One of my “someday” projects is to make a good book tracker app, including metadata for analysis: dates read, number of pages, year created, rating, blah blah blah. But until that happens, this is part of how I fill my moleskine. I give each book half a page and a little box where I draw its cover with colored pencils. So I hate covers like Six Degrees - impossible to draw. King Rat? The Kite Runner? I can do those. Some covers, however, end up looking like crap. That’s OK. It’s just meant to break up the endless blocks of tiny writing where I complain about authors using the word “teeming” eight times in two hundred pages. Example:
[The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco]
Eco is boring and impenetrable, but I needed something to read. Mom lent this to me a long time ago. I liked parts of it - more parts than in Foucault’s Pendulum. Odd, dreamy, allegorical, confused. I liked the bits about Baroque science; reminded me of the Neal Stephenson cycle. But the battles? the Lady? the priests or whatever? Boring!
The reviews are sometimes pretentious and spoilery and that is why I don’t show most of them to people. I like my system, though, because re-reading old pages tells me something about myself mixed in with the books. But if I don’t record things right away, I lose my ideas and sometimes the order I read them in - sometimes even the cover drawing when I have to give back an obscure book. MY NEXT PROJECT IS KNITTING A MOLESKINE-IPOD COZY.
comments (3)
i may steal your idea, but don't hate me if i do
– erinnn on 8/2/2005 19:33:31
Such a strange girl.
– phil on 8/3/2005 22:50:08
i think yer nuts. Eco kicks ass, and is hardly inpenetrable. If he confuses you, look up some of his source material and you'll be blown away by how he takes the actuality of something a gives it purpose. The island of the day before, though not his best work, is certainly an archetype as far as historical allegory in fiction goes. Did you read the name of the rose?
– tha_iconoclast on 8/5/2005 00:21:37
comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.
