Cornell Note Taking Notebooks Novels & Stories

Mr Jones quipped. As soon as we took a seat, I opened my notebook and had my pen in hand, prepared to take notes. I use colour coding, highlighters, and other planning tools to keep my notebooks looking as presentable as possible. It makes studying a lot easier. “Class, as you know, your finals are coming soon,” Mr Jones declared. "In this exam, you will be tested on your knowledge and skills, so be ready. For the test, you will be working in pairs. Your partners will be the people seated next to you; don't even consider switching seats since I shall record your names,” Mr Jones explained.

The notebook is a cheap spiral-bound thing I bought in a stationery shop in Brooklyn three weeks ago, before I knew what I was packing for. The cover is blue cardboard, already soft at the corners. Inside are eleven days of transcriptions, every deed and manifest and shipping record I have translated, every note I have made in the margins, every photograph reference I have logged. The pages are filled with my handwriting, small and precise, the handwriting of someone who learned early that words left room are words that can be used against you.

Adrian laughed, and the sound of it filled the study the way it always filled rooms, and Cassian noted it the way he always noted it, which was with his whole attention, and somewhere in one of the twelve notebooks that truth was also written down. Author's note: THE NOTEBOOKS. I've been waiting to write this chapter since Chapter 3. Cassian has been keeping these for TWENTY THREE YEARS. He wrote down the laugh. He wrote down the grey hair. He wrote down all of it. I'm going to need a moment.

Because you were looking for it. Hunter's three notebooks. The stack of them on the corner of the table, because he had finished one and started two more and had not yet decided which was the active one. I could tell which was the new one by the spine — stiffer, less worn, the decision not yet made in its pages. I could tell which was the near-finished one by the pen tucked into the spiral. He marked the active notebook with a pen so he could find it. The third one was somewhere between, a question still being decided.

He looked at her for a moment. The desk was hers in the specific way that tools became theirs to the people who used them correctly—the specific angle she held the notebook when she was thinking, the two pencils always parallel at the top right, and the way she read research papers by printing them rather than reading on screen and annotating in the margins in a handwriting he had never been able to fully decipher.

He closed the notes. He thought about the three-generation commission notebook, now at forty-four pages. He thought about the Farrow notebook at thirty-six, complete — the Farrows in the building, the notebook closed at the twentieth of August. He thought about the notebooks as the practice's record — not the drawings, which were the practice's product, but the notebooks, which were the practice's thinking. The inside view of the inside view.

Even that detail, so precise and so Lila, made something tighten in Mia's chest. She cut the tape with a box cutter and folded back the flaps. Books. A scented candle. A University of Texas pennant. A rain jacket. And beneath all of it, wrapped in a plain paper bag, two composition notebooks—the kind with the black-and-white marbled covers that Lila had used for everything in college: class notes, grocery lists, arguments she was having with people who weren't in the room. She had called them her thinking books. Mia sat down on the concrete floor of the storage unit with the notebooks in her lap.

Curious, I reached for it and pulled it free. The moment I moved it aside, I noticed a worn notebook resting underneath. My brows slowly furrowed. There was nothing remarkable about the cover itself. Yet the moment I opened it, everything changed. My eyes widened almost immediately. Every single page was covered in Bella’s handwriting. The notebook was not filled with personal thoughts or random notes. It was filled with work, detailed project proposals occupied entire sections. Risk assessments had been prepared months in advance and emergency solutions had already been mapped out long before problems ever occurred.

Room 218 was empty except for one thing: a child's desk. Pink. Plastic. The kind with a lift-top lid and a compartment inside for pencils and secrets. I sat on the small chair. Knees up. Ridiculous. But I didn't move to the floor. The desk was the point. The size was the point. Opened the lid. Inside: a notebook. Spiral-bound. Hello Kitty on the cover. Faded. Taped at the corners where it had torn.

After all it’s not his fault that I have issues. “Hey. Did I miss any notes while I was gone?” I ask, steeling my features to look as neutral as possible. He almost looks startled that I’m talking to him. “Oh, um, I forgot to mention. There’s not really a reason to take notes. Mrs. Harrison’s study guides and tests are identical. And we work in groups for the guides which come directly from the book.” “Oh. Thanks.” I doodle with my pen for the rest of class, trying to make it look like I’m paying attention.