Petya K. Grady’s recent post (linked in comment) inspired me to start a commonplace book, and this Mother’s Day, my one request was a trip to the bookstore to buy a fresh notebook. I was so excited that I started immediately trawling my digital annotation files for quotations to copy over. And now I’m off to a very un-systematic start. Do I go back through all my old digital annotations (from Google Play ebooks)? The answer has to be no, so that I’m not imposing an enormous burden on myself. But given that, how do I choose which books to double-back to?

Suggestions welcome as some sort of method to follow (I suppose the simplest method would be to not go back to old annotations at all). In the meantime, here’s something I pulled from my digital archives and copied into my new book:

Now entering her teens, Louisa was well aware of the awkwardness with which she tended to impress people. “I am old for my age,” she admitted, “and don’t care much for girls’ things. People think I’m wild and queer.” Yet Abba made her gangly second daughter at home with her strangeness. She believed that her daughter’s fitfulness was the sign of a spirit aspiring upward, of an energy that neither a sleepy Massachusetts town nor a teenaged body could easily contain. Abba slipped inspiring notes in Louisa’s journal, and, always, she encouraged her daughter to write, not just as a means of moral examination, as her father would have it, but as a means of creative self-expression.

John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts.