At the beginning of February I bought a Moleskine Passions Notebook (£16). If you are not already aware, there are several to choose from including recipe journal, film journal, wine journal and the one I chose – the book journal. The choice was a difficult one, and I went with the book journal because it coincided with my new year’s resolution to read more books.
The notebook is 13x21cm in size and has 240 pages. The photos above show the notebook with the paper sleeve still on and then with it off. Personally I love the colour the sleeve brings to it and find the notebook covering a bit boring without – even though the impressions in the cover do make it more interesting than a simple plain cover.
Photographs show a selection of the pages. There is a planning section at the beginning. Then there is the alphabetised section for your books. The space at the back includes blank tabbed pages, an index and blank sheets. The layout is good, the alphabetised pages and index make the book easy to use and find things.
I just wrote in the book (although you can download templates if you prefer to type it up). Information that you enter for each book include:
- Title
- Author
- Nationality
- Date read
- Publisher
- First edition
- Year
- Original Language
- Awards
- Notes
- Quotes
- Opinion
As can be seen in the above picture. I jazzed up the notebook a bit by writing in coloured pens. I think in someways I made a bad choice with books, as there is less you can stick in the book to make it more interesting by way of “scrapbooking” it – unlike films and recipes for example.
As I mentioned before there is space at the book for your own tabbed entries. The stickers the provide you with provide plenty of inspiration to help you decide what to use these pages for:
What do I love about this notebook?
- the alphabetised section which is tabbed like an address book
- index
- the quotes and opinion boxes on the pages about the book instead of just a simple title, author, comments set-up that most book journals seem to follow.
- freedom to make up your own sections and loads of stickers and room to be creative
What I don’t like about this notebook?
- In many ways there is nothing I couldn’t do myself in a plain notebook
- quite expensive for the simplicity of it all
- quite boring if you don’t do anything extra to jazz it up
- limited number of pages for each letter – I would go over this for some letters.
Anyone been using the book journal? or one of the other passions notebooks? I did have good intentions of getting the film one as well – but now I’m not so sure!
Hi!
First of all, it’s always interesting to find that there are other people out there who are as addicted to notebooks as I am…
But the point here is the Moleskine Passions: Books.
I just got mine today!
I have to say that I bought mine through the BookDepository, and it cost me €10 (which is about £11). If I were to buy it here in Portugal it would cost me €18 (~£20), which was the reason why I didn’t buy one until now…
Anyway, I’m not fully convinced yet either. I also think that the notebook could use a little more colour – I like the embossed cover, but it lacks something, though I’m not sure what… (But then again, I’m one of those who uses the red-cover moleskine, instead of the classic black one…) But maybe I’ll get a sticker or two and just “jazz it up a bit”, as you say (at least the back cover, since the front cover is embossed).
Interestingly, though, one of the things you actually liked about the book-journal (the alphabetized section) is the one thing I don’t like, for the same reason that you mentioned as a fault: the fact that some letters will quickly get full while others probably won’t get any entry whatsoever…
Personally, I prefered those pages to be left “un-tabbed”, and I would just fill them as I read books, that is chronologically. But that’s just me and you might find it more useful than I will. In fact, I’m thinking about simply removing those tabs altogether and don’t mind about that 😉
So, some of the disavantages you mentioned will just cease to be (for me, at least!).
For me, the greatest disavantage is the small space left for us to fill. For those like me that have a large handwritting, it might become a bit difficult to fit everything into those rectangles. I have to write more slowly and that kind of ruins the point, especially when it comes to the “quotes” part, that I want to fill on the go, when I find a sentence on a book that I like (and don’t want to forget).
But I think I can get used to that (and it might be useful to force me to tame my handwritting)…
In general, there’s a detail or two that I might have done differently, but I think it does the trick.
As for doing the same thing with a blank notebook, I don’t know… I personally don’t like to have to “format” everything myself and I am not a fan of those MSK templates that one can download from the Moleskine website and glue to the pages of their notebooks… It kind of ruins the point…
So, I’m not convinced, but I’m getting there 😉
Nice post, by the way. It’s useful for those who may be thinking of buying one of these notebooks to have the opinion of someone already using them!