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Add "book notes elsewhere" post. Update Uses and Policing the Crisis.
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title: "Other People's Book Notes" | ||
last_modified_at: | ||
categories: # [blips, now, notes, monthly-signal-boost, photonic-jukebox, ways, weekly-assemblage] | ||
excerpt: "Enthusing about how other people share their notes." | ||
tags: [notetaking, personal websites, reading notes] | ||
# header: | ||
# image: /assets/images/weekly-assemblage.png | ||
# caption: 'Photo credit: [**Unsplash**](https://unsplash.com)' | ||
published: true | ||
toc: true | ||
comments: | ||
date: 2024-09-19T19:49:57-6:00 | ||
--- | ||
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Over on Mastodon, [Jacky Alciné recently asked](https://todon.eu/@jalcine/113165841754837933) if anyone has examples of sites that talk about books. | ||
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As it turns out, I apparently **do indeed** have some favorite ways other people do this on their personal sites. To keep this list easier to find in the future, I figured I'd turn my quick response to him into a slightly-longer blog post. | ||
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## Format: Mostly Notes, Thank You | ||
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A lot of people tend to have a pretty grid of book covers without their own notes, but with each cover linking to Bezos's commerce site. That's one way to track your reading, and I do usually appreciate the eye candy or occasional overall rating included in this approach. | ||
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I'm really more interested in people's thoughts and feelings, though. So I prefer some sort of written summary or reaction. | ||
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It's also very kind to put all one's book notes in a single place, rather than interspersed in your blog posts. Blog posts are a great approach, of course, and I fully intend to do more reading reactions in posts here! But the examples below all take a more "digital garden" approach, even if some of them are still blog-ish. | ||
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## Examples Elsewhere | ||
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### Mandy Brown | ||
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If you haven't already seen Mandy Brown's [A Working Library](https://aworkinglibrary.com/), you're in for a treat. will usually have a few posts about a single book, and occasionally a sort of combo post that connects to a few. I really like her approach & site! | ||
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### Tom MacWright | ||
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On Tom MacWright's [Reading page](https://macwright.com/reading/), he usually writes one overview review of a book. He doesn't frequently situate it along other works—but I like encountering someone else's thoughts in this format. | ||
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### Derek Sivers | ||
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On Derek Siver's [Books I've Read page](https://sive.rs/book), he provides a succinct overview excerpt, and then each title also has a page with his notes. It's nice how the index page can be re-sorted by title, newest, or best. | ||
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The notes on each book's page do often feel more like they're written for him rather than for another person, since I can't quite tell if he's copying & pasting or what, but hey—it's his site! I'm just glad to poke around what he's read sometimes! | ||
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### Tom Critchlow | ||
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Tom Critchlow has a number of book-related things in [his Jekyll-based wiki](https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/), including a page linking to [digital bookshelves he admires](https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/books/bookshelves/), a number of [other book-related notes](https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/books/), an idea for a [JSON-based alternative to Goodreads](https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/), and finally, his own [books read page](https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/books/books-read/). | ||
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His summaries are quite brief, and feel written mostly as reminders-to-himself, and I mean that in a way that I appreciate. | ||
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### Maggie Appleton | ||
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Although it's a prime example of the "mostly an eye-candy grid" approach, I really like the way that Mapple Appleton's website contains both a [library](https://maggieappleton.com/library) of books she's "read that significantly influenced" how she sees the world and an [antilibrary](https://maggieappleton.com/antilibrary) of books she likes "the idea of having read". | ||
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The idea of giving yourself this antilibrary's kind of "things I find interesting but probably won't do" sort of list somehow simultaneously breaks my brain and chills it out. Based on that alone, these pages feel worth mentioning. I also like the selections on each list! I just can't help but wish she provided her site's visitors with some kind of annotation or brief snippet of her own thoughts on each. What can I say? I guess I'm nosy, greedy, or probably a bit of both. | ||
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## Examples of Your Own? | ||
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I don't typically end blog posts with the "what about you, reader?" type of conclusion that seemed very common in the first big wave of blogging I remember reading. Partially that's because it can sometimes feel formulaic, and partially that's just because I haven't always had comments enabled on here. | ||
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With this topic, I would certainly love to learn what other people are doing. I'm still curious about other answers to Jacky's question, so I don't want to write a "conclusion"—I want to keep the question in play! | ||
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Have you seen other great examples? Have you made your own and want to share? Please let me know, here, on Mastodon, or however else makes sense to you. |