Book journal entry

I added an entry to my book journal this morning, which is always a pleasure.  I take extraordinary pride and pleasure in my book journal, which I've kept since 1974.  I'm now into the sixth volume, although I've switched over from the black sketchbooks I've always used and am instead using a small black three-ring notebook where I add typewritten (despite being an anachronism, this is a better and more vivid word than the bland and mechanical descriptor" word processed") pages instead of handwriting pages.

Writing about a book after I've finished reading it helps me think about it again, place it in the context of other books I've read, and savor passages again that I liked enough to mark while reading.   But most importantly, writing about a book is a way to save one little part of my interior life.  Emotions are a part of the experience of reading a book, and thus my book journals are a record of characters, stories, sentences and writers that meant something to me. 

For the record, I wrote this morning about Meredith Hall's memoir "Without a Map," and tomorrow I'll write about "In the Lake of the Woods" by Tim O'Brien, which I finished two night ago.  I can't wait to see what I have to say about that book!