  I'm always reading six different books or more. Actually, I'm seriously going through front to back about three, and I find I've got another set that make up a sort of research fad, as I thumb through them several times a day as I write or whatever. In fact, I've opened up a whole bookshelf for the temperary rotation slot in an effort to rid my house of my many stacks of book fads. Maybe because I'm always reading multiple texts, and maybe b/c I, like Phil, don't have Google squatting behind my eyes, I've turned into a person who makes a lot of reading notes. I've got pages of word docs in disorganized spots on my hard drive from times that I actually make notes as I go through these books.
Lately, I've been thinking of making a seperate blog--I wanted to call it booknotes or the margin or some such similarly quippy name--just to organize and share these notes. And damn it if Phil didn't beat me to it! urlLink Phil Gyford: Writing: External scaffolding : "I’m a forgetful man. I could tell you the names of most people in my classes at school or college, but when it comes to the contents of books or plots of films I’m usually stumped. I’ve often wondered whether it’s worth plodding through several hundred pages of a non-fiction book when a couple of weeks later I might only remember a couple of ideas. I deeply, deeply envy people who can rattle off quotes and references as if Google is squatting behind their eyes. So, in an effort to make something, anything, stick, I’ve started taking notes when I read non-fiction books. A few post-it notes nestled inside the cover are a convenient place to scribble thoughts and summaries. Later I type these up so I can still read them in the future, so I can search them, so I can back them up, and in the hope that the repetition will hammer a few more facts into place.
Given I have the notes in digital form I thought I might as well put them online; a couple of hours work in setting the weblog up means I can access my notes from anywhere and search them easily, making them a much more accessible form of external scaffolding (a term I picked up from Small Pieces Loosely Joined).
There’s always a chance someone else will find them useful too. Having only done three books so far it’s hard to tell how things will settle down (assuming I keep this going), but I expect the notes will be a mixture of the points I found most interesting and attempts at a complete summary. We’ll see how it goes. " 
