3 of My Favorite Fictional Notebooks

"…the notebooks exuded the force of seduction..."

Felled by a nasty cold, I’ve spent this past week revisiting my favorite fictional notebooks. After all, the only thing I love as much as a stuffed notebook brimming with paper and ideas is a fictional one. And there are so many novels with tantalizing notebooks to choose from! Here’s a selection of my favorites.

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1) Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

First edition cover

Anna Wulf is “cracking up” to use the novel’s language. Lessing narrates Wulf’s story by interweaving excerpts from her many notebooks with a rather traditional novel. The novel itself is fractured, just as Wulf imagines herself to be.

As a way of imposing order on her thoughts, Wulf tells herself that she has given each notebook a purpose, designated by color:

I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary.

But the fractures among the notebooks reflect her own internal fissures, her own breakdown.

…for it has become clear to me, reading the notebooks that I remain Anna because of a certain kind of intelligence. This intelligence is dissolving and I am very frightened.

And so Anna begins the titular golden notebook, which is meant to tie all the pieces together.

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2) Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name

First edition cover

The second Neapolitan novel begins with Lila “entrusting” a box filled with eight notebooks to her friend Elena. And though Elena swore not to read the notebooks, bound in an “excessive amount of string,” she can’t help herself. Almost immediately, she unties the string and reads (and then rereads) her friend’s words.

…the notebooks exuded the force of seduction that Lila had given off since she was a child. She had treated the neighborhood, her family, the Solaras, Stefano, every person or thing with ruthless accuracy.

It is a moment of startling intimacy in the lives of these two friends who have spent their lives together. And it is also a moment that exhibits Elena’s envy—after reading Lila’s notebooks, she dramatically pushes them off a bridge and into the river.

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3) Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass

What is the connection between our notes and our memory? Lewis Carroll brilliantly parodies this eternal question with the King in Through the Looking Glass

Alice picks up the King in Tenniel’s illustration from the first edition

He claims he will never forget being picked up and moved by Alice. (The King is, after all, a chess piece.)

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”

“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.

The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at last he panted out, “My dear! I really must get a thinner pencil. I can’t manage this one a bit; it writes all manner of things that I don’t intend—”

“What manner of things?” said the Queen, looking over the book (in which Alice had put “The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly”) “That’s not a memorandum of your feelings!”

Of course, there isn’t as direct a connection between our memory and our notebooks. And that is all for the good—otherwise a mischievous Alice might direct our pencils to write something that contradicts our own memory.

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There are so many wonderful novels and poems that feature notebooks—but these are my absolute favorites. Tell us all about your favorite fictional notebooks in the comments!

I’ll be back next week with a new Halloween-themed post,