A New Project

For several years now I have been following the posts of Coudal Partners. I don't recall exactly how I arrived there. Perhaps it was through hearing about their Field Notes notebooks, which I now always keep handy. Or their Booking Bands, in which they took user submissions combining book titles and band names. (I think "The Reverend Horton Heat Hears a Who" is my favorite.) Or perhaps it was just their homepage listing of "Fresh Signals," which caught my eye, where fascinating, beautiful, hilarious, Kubrickian, and all-around interesting links are picked out of the tangled World Wide Web and organized for your browsing pleasure.

But of all the varied projects that Coudal has embarked on, I am most fascinated by their Field Tested Books endeavor. Here, they have collected a variety of brief reflections on books from readers from all over the world. And I do not mean that the readers are from all over the world (though, indeed, they are). Rather, the reflections are accounts that take place all over the world. Readers write about where they were when they read (or in one humorous case, did not read) a specific book, and how the book and their location interacted to form a unique reading experience.

Jim Coudal writes this about the project:

We had this notion that somehow through experimentation we could identify how our perception of a book is affected by the place where we read it. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe it’s possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it.

We’ve been trying for over six years now, and frankly, we’re not getting any closer to a definitive answer. We know, without a doubt, that book and place do affect each other, and that they are bound as a single experience in our memories.

Complicating the quest for a tidy conclusion is the fact that sometimes the place where we read a book is not just a geographical spot but also a psychological one. In fact, the most compelling Field Tests in this collection are the ones in which a book, a physical place, and a significant emotional moment collide.

Having read dozens of these beautiful, humorous, mesmerizing reflections, I have endeavored to create my own project inspired by Field Tested Books. While traveling Europe last spring, I found myself reading a variety of books in a variety of places, and often found myself thinking back to the many field tests I had read. How would these reading experiences I was having in trains, planes, and hostels compare to those of others in the field? And what of the field tests I'd conducted in previous years? Was my location in time as important as my location in space? These were all things I wanted to explore as I began jotting titles, locations, and years into my Field Notes notebook.

Like Jim Coudal, I don't expect any definitive answer to the interplay. I merely want to explore and reflect. To create a document that is part map, part timeline, where Earth's geography can overlap with Middle Earth's, and where paper time machines blur the edges between my present and pasts I never lived. A record of exploration across time, space, and page. A personal chronotopgraphy.