A Scholar’s Dilemma: The Limits of the Physical Page

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.”

- Carl Sagan

I’ll preface this post by saying that I love books - real books with paper between the spines. The texture of the paper over my fingertips as I turn the pages - the smell as I flick through, listening to the familiar sound of those off-white leaves hitting one another in an excited fan-like buzz. Memories from childhood are immediately summoned: the eager, heart-racing anticipation as the cashier carefully packs my mother’s purchase into the W.H.Smith bag; the sudden calm when, once home, my hands feel the fine coloured spine and crispness of the freshly-printed pages; and finally, the excitement of beginning a new story, with familiar characters I hadn’t seen all summer like long-lost friends beckoning me on a fantastical journey away from school and all the troubles of life. I was fortunate to experience first-hand the fastest selling book series in history: Harry Potter.

My sister kindly purchased a Kindle for one of my birthdays when I was a teenager - about 2010, or so. Whilst I enjoyed it for what it was at the time, you must understand that Amazon Kindle and its ecosystem wasn’t what it is today. With no debit card until I was 18, the Kindle sadly became neglected.

As I started my scholarly pursuit of the writing craft, amongst other pursuits like the understanding of the Christian Holy Scriptures, I realised I was lacking the ability to recall the information I was reading. I thought about purchasing post-it notes and highlighters and copies of books from charity shops I could scribble my own notes inside. After all, this was actively encouraged during Bible Classes, so why wouldn’t the same be true of other study also?

Yet at the same time it felt sacrilegious to write inside a standard book not designed with wide margins and inviting lines to make notes on (unlike my Study Bible at the time). And even then, I would have no choice but to make my handwritten notes and place the books back on the bookshelves, unable to recall those crucial bits of information unless I picked the books back up. It was a system that wasn’t scalable or manageable.

The Halfway House

I lived with this issue for a long time. Whilst various Bible apps have made my study of the Christian Scriptures much easier, for the other areas of interest I was forced into an ecosystem of deliberately writing thoughts, quotes, and summaries of books I had read in Apple Notes, which worked because they synchronised between my various devices; yet it was an ecosystem that never worked as well as I always intended. The Bible is a book I hold dearly that I return to every day, when I can. Other books always come secondary, and may go untouched for months or even years, regardless of the level of enjoyment I had with them.

When I learnt that the Kindle and its associated app allowed for highlighting - and in colour - I developed a system of colour-coding my highlights: the dark and murky orange would be for anything associated with death or grief or sadness or the like (and any story worth its salt ought tackle this delicate subject at least once to speak of the human condition); blue would be for anything I found inspirational, like a particular description of scenery; yellow would be for anything quotable or amusing. The simple rule was that these highlights had to move me in some way.

This somewhat worked for a time, but only if in my reading I first owned a copy of a book on the Kindle. My habit of purchasing pre-loved books from the local charity shops had to be curbed. Whilst I enjoyed the pick and come again nature of the paperbacks, and the addictive lottery of finding a rare hardback cheaply, the truth was that they took up a lot of room, and then I would have the added pressure of either finding a space for them (if I was to keep them), or return to the charity shop for someone else to equally enjoy. If time and money allowed, I think it’s the dream of every avid reader to own a rich mahogany library with a sliding ladder that leads to many loved leather-bound volumes.

Fortunately, time, space and monetary constraints forced me into a frugal love affair. Kindle books are, for the most part, and if one exercises patience for sales, cheaper than paperbacks and hardbacks, being readily available without the cost of cutting down trees and printing hundreds and thousands of pages - and better yet: they scarcely take up any room on a simple Kindle reader.

I say this system worked for a time, and only then somewhat, because until very recently the Kindle devices weren’t available in colour - they only displayed the simplistic black and white tones of e-ink devices. If I wanted to highlight a passage whilst reading with my devised system, I would still need to open the Kindle app on my phone or iPad or computer. Furthermore, whilst the Vocabulary Builder is an excellent tool, it’s limited only to the Kindle device itself - unless you export the database through a complex and time-consuming method. And even then, it was a simple spreadsheet you would need to keep updating manually. It is a tedious effort for little reward, especially when the Vocabulary Builder is limited to 100 words.

I also ran head-first into the same old problem: unless I actively opened the Kindle book back up and reviewed my highlights, and associated Apple Notes, particularly whilst writing a scene or chapter to find inspiration for my own work, I would simply read the book, highlight away, close it, and never again see the compost heap I had been creating throughout my reading experience. And that was precisely what I was creating: numerous compost heaps all spread throughout different, interspersed and overgrown gardens: disconnected save for a vague highlighting system that at best fluctuated in its own ruleset, like a barely discernible path of red bricks weaving throughout. After all, when one day I found a passage that was both regarding grief but also woven into a description of scenery, what colour would I choose? Once again, the system was neither scalable nor manageable.

The True Compost Heap

“One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien

Every early spring after the snowdrops have given their first flurry of flower at the beginning of the year and the daffodils are thrusting through the earth to join the awakening choir, I venture to the compost bin at the rear of our garden to collect the soil produced from the waste of last year’s growth. It is a single compost bin, large and black, that provides me with earth filled with sufficient nutrients for the growth of the new seeds we’ve planned for our garden during the winter. No weeds nor overlarge items that can’t be broken down are thrown in during the year’s cycle. As the old saying goes: rubbish in, rubbish out.

I realised through this natural cycle that I likewise needed a singular system for all my reading - a singular compost heap of the mind, no longer connected by a fragile system with rules that could change on any given day.

I needed what many call a Second Brain.

The concept in itself is simple: as we have one brain with numerous areas for our varied interests, so too would this second brain be a singular system for all avenues of interest that could, if one so desired, be interlinked. But better yet, and much like our own brains: this information could be recalled - and not only recalled, but be the very compost from which our own works can sprout like the first seedlings in spring, and grow and flourish and be enjoyed not only by ourselves, but others also. A garden shared is a garden enjoyed.

As with all plans for a garden, I first needed a structure to host this Second Brain, or True Compost Heap. I needed a knowledge system that could be customised to suit my needs and be scalable and maintainable: I needed to automate its filling.

After a lot of research and trial and error, I opted to use a system called Obsidian.

It’s future-proof in that the text files you create are written in Markdown format, so even if Obsidian vanished from the earth one day, the transition to another similar system would be easier than say, if I relied on Word documents or Excel spreadsheets.

Its true power resides in its Community Plugins: additional features designed by other users who have felt a need or pain point, who have then gone on to develop solutions to tackle those very things.

Kindle Highlights

The first plugin I downloaded is called ‘Kindle Highlights’. I configured it to point to my 03 - Resources & Library/Kindle/Highlights folder. This meant that for every book I read, if it had highlights or notes made in Kindle or the Kindle app, a new Markdown file named after the title of the book would appear in this folder with all of my notes and highlights.

The notes feature of this plugin is particularly powerful. No longer did I need to rely purely on the interchangeable highlighting strategy; instead, I could select the text whilst reading on the Kindle, add a note with a specific tag, like #desc-inspiration, or #desc-grief, and when I next opened Obsidian the Kindle Highlights plugin would synchronise with my Amazon account, and the new note would appear in the configured folder. If the note already existed, it would update with the newest selection of highlights and tagged notes.

This made my vocabulary building much easier as well. No longer did I need to rely on the Vocabulary Builder within the Kindle itself, or fiddle about with cables and over-complex exports and temporary software on my computer. I could simply select a word, add a new note in the Kindle, add a tag like #define, and then it would appear in my Obsidian vault ready to be processed.

Speaking of processing, I ensured that at the top of every new file I added was a small block of metadata (known as YAML frontmatter) in the file content, like:

---
processed: false
---

This then meant I could use Obsidian’s powerful default plugin called Dataview to query all the notes within this folder and see which I had processed and which I hadn’t. Think of it like putting scraps into a compost heap: after finishing a book, I would review all the words I needed to define, and all the sentences that moved or inspired me, and quote them in either my Lexicon notes, or my Description Thesaurus, respectively. I say quote using Obsidian’s internal linking, which embeds the original highlight and lets me click back to the source note and see what else I had highlighted or made notes on for that book.

The Living Lexicon

I mention a vocabulary database, which is simply a folder within Obsidian, like: 03 - Resources & Library/Lexicon.

For each word I define, I create a new note from a template (another powerful Obsidian feature) which includes the predefined metadata that I then fill in, like the below example for the word ’loquacious’:

---
word: Loquacious
definition: Tending to talk a great deal; talkative.
category: Descriptors
subcategory: Personality
synonyms:
  - talkative
  - chatty
  - garrulous
example_sentence: Never loquacious, Sarah was now totally lost for words.
date_added: 2024-10-19
related_words:
  - "[[Talkative]]"
  - "[[Garrulous]]"
---

I can then use the Dataview plugin to make a table to show me all the words in the Descriptors category or Personality subcategory, or any other combination. As you can imagine, this suddenly becomes a powerful tool, not only for a budding author, but for anyone who wishes to learn not only through reading but recall and lookup also.

The Description Thesaurus

This is the area I often find myself in, particularly during the editing phase. The best way to learn how to describe things is to analyse how other writers have done precisely that.

Beneath 03 - Resources & Library/The Writing Craft/Desccription Thesaurus I have files named simply, like Dragons, or Forests. Each file includes in-line quotes from the books I’ve read that describe these elements.

Let’s pick the most exciting example of all - dragons. Within the note I have subheadings like “Appearance”; therefore, my note might read something like:

# Appearance
> ![[Pratchett-Aaranovitch-Guards! Guards!#^ref-64801]]
> - *Terry Pratchett - Guards! Guards!*
> **Technique:** “Craggy nostrils” anthropomorphizes or exaggerates anatomical detail, evoking rough terrain to imply age or monstrousness. Pratchett often uses tactile, geological metaphors to make the familiar seem absurd or the strange seem grounded.
---
> ![[Pratchett-Aaranovitch-Guards! Guards!#^ref-44468]]
> - *Terry Pratchett - Guards! Guards!*
> **Technique:** The paradox “so cold he burned” plays with sensory contradiction. Pratchett’s use of touch detail (blisters, frozen air) creates _visceral immediacy_, drawing the reader physically into Errol’s strangeness. This is classic “show, don’t tell,” with layered sensory contrast.

I have the quote, the book it’s from and the author - but most importantly, I have my own notes on the technique employed, written in Obsidian whilst I’m processing the Kindle Highlight note.

The Fruits of Interconnected Gardens

There is, admittedly, still a lot of manual toil in this process, and the work can quickly build up if I venture from one book to another, make my highlights and notes, and don’t process them for a time. But that would be the same with a compost heap that is filled repeatedly and never emptied: the soil at the bottom must be harvested and employed in the growing of other seeds.

The beauty is that this system isn’t only for the writing craft, or a single area of interest. It can be employed for multiple areas in life, like cooking, music, psychiatry, linguistic study, religious study, or anything else that you enjoy. With the interconnected tagging system, you’ll discover as I have the wonder of how these areas can intersect and birth new original ideas within your own work. No longer will the red-bricked pathway be obscured with overgrown untended beds; it will instead weave through and between beautifully tended gardens filled with the fruits of your labour, which will go on to feed your ideas and craft, whatever it may be, for many years to come.

And as for the beloved hardbacks? You need only purchase the ones you truly love, that have a well-deserved space on your bookshelf to observe, cherish, and share with others forevermore.