Quantity of notes is a useful measurement
I take notes on paper while I read, and file them chronologically as I finish with each source. On other projects, I’ve recorded just the title and the date in my table of contents, but this time I added the number of pages of notes. It’s a handy little metric! The quantity of notes correlates well with the impact a book had on me, and it’s very easy to scan.
If someone asked me to recommend a book about education or death, so far I would head for anything with five or more pages of notes in my Binder of Doom. (The notes wiki gets a filtered, delayed set of notes.)
Several pages of notes
- Instead of Education, by John C. Holt (8 pages)
- On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (6 pages)
- Being and Time (selected sections), by Martin Heidegger (5 pages)
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach (5 pages)
Two or three pages
- Compulsory Mis-Education (selected chapters), by Paul Goodman (3 pages)
- Body Worlds 3 exhibit (2 pages)
- The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards (2 pages)
- The Saddest Music In The World, dir. Guy Maddin (2 pages — a lot of these were artistic, for web design inspiration)
Single pages
- Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, by Neil Postman (1 page — this sucked hard)
- Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1 page)
- The Future of Statues, by Rene Magritte (1 page)
- How to Read Heidegger, by Mark Wrathall (1 page — selected chapters)
- My Arm, perf. Tim Crouch (1 page)
- An Oak Tree, perf. Tim Crouch (1 page)
- Regarding Sarah, dir. Michelle Porter (1 page)
- Surgeons’ Hall Museum, Edinburgh (1 page)
- Volver, dir. Pedro Almodovar (1 page)
Each “page” is a double-sided sheet of paper. For some reason I am self-conscious about the amount of notes I take. I have not been recording these scholastic anxieties and old school-related wounds, but maybe I should start. That could be my next metric— awkward moments prompted by each source.