Book threads #1

What I've been reading and why I've been reading it

Sometimes I’ll read books in apparent isolation with no obvious antecedents but mostly, what I read follows threads. This is one thread I’ve been following over the past few weeks…

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen

The Library: A Fragile History, Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin

All The Devils Are Here, David Seabrook

Question 7, Richard Flanagan

It began - sort of - with The Notebook by Roland Allen. I can’t recall who recommended it, I have a feeling it was a couple of different people, and forget now what prompted their recommendations, but it was almost certainly the result of another, now invisible thread.

As its subtitle tells us, The Notebook is a history of thinking on paper - an early example of cognitive offloading and is, fittingly, a thoughtful meditation written in the margins of intellectual history.

Allen traces the diverse forms of notebooks, showing how each shapes a distinct mode of thought. The ledger is ruled and rigid, built for precision and accountability; the commonplace book, by contrast, is a curated anthology of culture and self. The laboratory notebook - Leonardo’s is the obvious go to here - is a methodical stage for scientific enquiry, where observation meets discipline. The field notebook, exemplified by the journals Darwin kept whilst aboard HMS Beagle, captures the world in situ and are a record of immediacy and outward attention as well as later reflection. Diaries such as Pepys’ turn inward, offering confession, companionship, and emotional truth. And the writer’s notebook is a chaotic crucible of creativity, where fragments spark future forms. Allen’s central claim is that notebooks don’t just store our thoughts, they shape them. Form becomes function; '“the medium is the massage” [sic]. What we write in and how, remakes how we think. It’s good stuff and from it dangled several tempting threads, two of which I’ve pulled.

First, I finally - after decades of it sitting on a shelf - picked up and read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. The instigation was Allen’s discussion of how Chatwin’s Moleskin journals intrude, self consciously, into the text. I knew I should read Chatwin but I have a somewhat inexplicable horror of ‘travel writing’. However, Allen’s description of the book and its writing process galvanised me and, it gives me great delight to say, I loved it. It’s part travelogue (obviously,) part philosophical inquiry, part fictionalised memoir. Ostensibly a book about the Aboriginal idea of singing the land into being - using ‘songlines’ as both maps and sacred stories - it unfolds as a deeper meditation on the nature of human restlessness and belonging.

Chatwin begins in the Australian outback, exploring how Aboriginal Australians navigate vast distances not with compasses or charts, but through intricate songs that encode geography, law, and ancestry. Each line of song corresponds to a path through the landscape, connecting sacred sites and oral history in a continuous act of world-making. For the Aboriginal peoples - at least in Chatwin’s telling - to sing the land is to own it, to know it, to care for it.

But soon the scope expands. The narrative becomes more fragmented, interspersed with notes from various notebooks containing digressions on nomadism, musings on evolution, and encounters with other wanderers. Chatwin is fascinated by the idea that humans are meant to move, that the act of walking is not merely transport but destiny. Deserts symbolise this restlessness: “The desert could not be claimed or owned — it was a piece of cloth, thrown out to the winds. Nomads had moved across it for centuries, leaving no trace.” The book becomes a songline of its own: a path traced through memory, myth, anthropology, and speculation. As Chatwin writes, “To put the world into a book was to make a Songline.” Ultimately, The Songlines resists easy categorisation. It is not quite reportage, not quite fiction (Chatwin is as much fictionalised character as he is narrator) not quite philosophy, but something, marvellously, in between.

This left some obvious threads hanging to which we’ll return shortly.