I’ve been subscribing to the rss feed of Sekar Writes for a while now – she writes these detailed summaries of books, the kind of summaries I aspire to write myself but I am seldom able to muster the mental capacity to. I don’t know how she finds the mental energy to read them and then write these summaries frequently. It is not easy to condense a book, at least for me.
Her latest summary is on The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, a book that caught my eye several times but I didn’t feel like I should spend my reading budget on a book purely about notebooks. Sekar’s summary made me realise the book was a lot more interesting and wide than I had initially thought:
Nobody’s quite sure when this lovely word first appeared, but by the 15th century it had become part of everyday notebook culture. Giovanni Rucellai, a wealthy merchant and art lover, described his zibaldone as “a salad of many herbs,” a perfect metaphor for what these books were: eclectic collections of things people loved. A favorite poem. A helpful recipe. A wise saying. A funny anecdote. Religious prayers. Rude jokes. Anything went.
People wrote their zibaldoni for themselves and also shared them with friends. If they saw something they liked in someone else’s notebook, they might copy it into your own. It was social, creative, and personal all at once.
Isn’t this a lot like modern blogging?
I guess I may pick up the book to read after all.
Sometimes I think if we are mindful enough to notice and note down more of our own thoughts – they are like a treasure trove. Unlike polished published work, notebooks show the process of how we think and develop, and that in turn shows more of our humanity.