Now that I’m really ramped up on reading, I read texts a little closer. I’m noticing more nuances and fine details of language usage. Neat plot devices and particularly well turned dialog stand out more.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of these observations are lost. They simply don’t get recorded. I generally don’t like writing in books that I own. And a significant percentage of the books I read are borrowed from the library, so it would quite rude, to say the least, to write in them.
Maybe a small Moleskine combined with a “noteblog” would be the way to go. Given the tempting convenience of blogging with posterous this might be low friction enough to easily get rolling. I have accounts on GoodReads and Readernaut that could be used for this, but I’m less interested these days in funneling my content into other folks silos, social networking possibilities be damned.
There might be some other benefits. I’d also like to get a real sense of my daily page count. That would be fairly easy to capture. While I don’t always read them promptly, I do manage to scan (as in quickly look through) all of the New Yorker issues in my subscription. Capturing observations about the articles I do manage to read, a decent number, and the issue overall might be a worthy endeavor.