For those who don’t know, I have the Moleskine Passion Journal (link) that I’ve had since 2013, and after five years, the time has come to give it a little make over and update. Realistically, I’ve had this journal longer than I’ve had this blog, as the first official book review I did on here was The Shock of the Fall in June 2014. But, if you go through the archives, there is a review from 2013 of R.J. Palacio’s Wonder, but this is a post I worked on later and backdated, similarly with my first book journal page on Gone Girl. So, since this is something book related, I thought that it would make an exciting post, and something different than just rambles or a book review.
Why some pages and not others?
There are some reviews that are harder to part with than others, and some that just really needed an update. Let’s be real, as much as I thought that my handwriting was amazing in 2013, it was not that easy to read at times, so some pages are getting a simple retype into the page template found online. My process of elimination was simple enough, and I categorized the reviews into different groups, and with a vast collection of post-it notes, was able to go from there and label them accordingly, essentially color coding – which is something that never fails me. I decided to stick to three colors, and these included blue, pink, and green. The pages that fell into the blue category were ones that were going to be blanked out, these were reviews of books that I didn’t take much care of writing up, or incomplete, or just did not make sense to have in the journal itself. But, there were some reviews of books that I did enjoy but was just not pleased with how they looked on the page, so these got put into the pink category, meaning they were getting typed and glued in. The last category was the easiest, green, or books that I noted down in the journal, started to read, but never got around to finishing but the page already started – this also allowed me to map out a reading list for the next few months. So, with pages divided into ‘remove’, ‘revamp’ and ‘complete’, I was able to go.
The process and the changes
As an English literature student, I always seem to have sticky notes of every size and color just laying around, and they prove very helpful for categorizing and labeling things in a clear manner. As afore stated, I had labeled certain posts with a certain color of note depending on if it needed to be removed or revamped, and having them each be a different label, I was able to get the numbers and get to typing on the previously downloaded template, or, the interactive PDF. It can be found through the mymoleskine site proved an impeccable find, and made things so much easier. But, realistically, that was the easy bit though, download, fill out (decipher some of the words), print, cut out and glue on the correct page.
The trickier bit came with fixing the contents page and a few others. Since I was getting rid of a fair few pages, I needed to edit the contents page and other bits and pieces that were threaded throughout the journal itself. I had some note cards, lined and plain paper lying around my room (as you do as a student), and was able to cut those up into the desired shapes and stick them in where I wanted them, and indeed, there are pages in the journal that now look like a scrap book project, but whats important is that it works. There is a section in the journal that allows for some supplementary content where I had what I called Supplementary book reviews where I would put in a word or two about a book I read that I didn’t have quotes, didn’t want to designate a page for, or simply just did not have space. This happened to my review of The Silkworm, which, after this revamp got its own page; I had a review of the first and third text of the trilogy so it only seemed fitting to actually incorporate this one as well.
The final result
After some time of color coding, filing out, printing, cutting, glueing, and more filling out, I finally accomplished what I set out to do, and I have to say, I am quite content. The process itself isn’t that tedious, but can get rather repetitive but can actually prove slightly therapeutic; how stressful can glueing things be after all right? It really isn’t something that takes that long, it’s just the sitting down and getting everything done that can get a little tricky at times. Editing my book journal is never really something that I thought that I would be doing, but alas, people change and some things here and there also need to be altered. Going forward, I’m sure this is something that I will be doing more and more, as it can be good to refresh a page or two, whether it is messy or not.
aga is reading 