Opening Up the Book Journal

A fellow reader recently sent me a link to this article about a book journal or, as Pamela Paul calls it, a “Book of Books.”  It’s a great article, and it sent me back to look through my book journal, which I wrote about last year here.  About her Book of Books, Paul writes, “Over the years, [Bob has] become in certain ways even more of a personal record than a diary might be, not about what happened but about how what happened made me think, drove my interests, shaped my ideas.”  It’s true: even though my book journal is only a list of titles and authors, with notations for fiction and non-fiction, it tells a story of my reading evolution over the past six years.  I can see all the books my mom has sent for our Book Club of Two, the point at which I started reading books for my MFA, and the increase in YA titles when I started The Infinite Booklist.  So, inspired by Paul’s article, I thought I’d try something new by opening up my book journal here once in a while.

So now and again, I’ll post a page from my book journal, and then I’ll note my favorite book from that page.  I already peeked, and I can tell sometimes I might have to choose two—after all, I read Amitav Ghosh and Philip Pullman for the first time on the same page—but I’ll try to stick to my favorites.

So here’s the first page of my Book Journal from June 2006 (I'm not sure why the picture came out all wacky, but anyway...)

My favorite book on this first page?
While The Lie That Tells A Truth remains one of my favorite craft books about writing, and while Electric Universe and Ordinary Wolves both shook my world a little bit, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place remains one of my all-time favorite books.