The Notebook by Roland Allen
I think I'm a note-taking nerd.
Roland Allen's The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper is one of my favorite nonfiction reads of the year.
In an easy-to-read 416 pages, Allen looks into the history of the notebook and explores the creation of the object and how it's been iterated on over the years—both how it's made and how it's used. Even if you're not interested in notebooks or note-taking for their own sake, this is a great read because of the number of notable historical names you learn about.
Even if you don't care about how notebooks progressed from from wax tablets, to papyrus, to parchment, to paper, to computers—as well as the myriad styles of notebooks used on each medium—you might be interested in how people like Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Marie Curie used notebooks to develop their ideas.
And some of the most interesting chapters of the book come from the notebooks of everyday people, whose names don't carry the same historic weight. How sailors lived their day-to-day lives, how banking and finance was developed in Italy with ledgers or how amateur naturalists in Denmark developed their own detailed drawings and depictions of fish around the world.
The book starts at the beginning, with the first known examples of notebooks we have and then pushes through history up to the current trend of bullet journaling. The pace of the book was great, without the fluff that is common to the genre, and Allen's writing is clean, simple and unobtrusive.
While the emphasis in this book is on physical notebooks and analogue note-taking, I still came away from the read excited about my own note-taking and journaling—which is fully digital with Obsidian.
If you're a note-taker or writer of any capacity, I'm guessing you'll enjoy this book. And if you're just interested in a fun, fast-paced general history book—I'd recommend it for that purpose as well.
Use it enough, and a notebook will change your brain.
It challenges us to create, to explore, to record, to analyse, to think. It lets us draw, compose, organise and remember – even to care for the sick. With it, we can come to know ourselves better, appreciate the good, put the bad in perspective, and live fuller lives.
Overall: 60
I use the 20-80 scale to rate things.