On the pleasure of reading private notebooks

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One reason I like this genre is that people censor themselves less when they are writing in private.

Roy Gold, Our War Baby and Arthur Rimbaud’s Reliquaire An earlier version of this was published in the waste book on January, 25, 2025 A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal’s Pensées, Simone Weil’s private essays, Lichtenberg’s waste books, Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, Kafka’s diary, Joubert’s Carnets, Wittgenstein’s Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. One reason I like this genre is that people censor themselves less…

On the pleasure of reading private notebooks

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