For the final reflection on my common place book, I choose to reflect on how my book represents me, as I agree with Standage that common place books serve as a form of self-definition. I would like to preface this with at the beginning of this class I had no clue how to do a common place book, so a lot of my early entries are just thoughts I had while reading with no outside information looked at. Due to this my book as a whole doesn’t really focus on any particular discourse. Although once we got to the beetle I started to steer to a mythological/historical discourse. I kept my book as a physical journal as I wanted to be able to draw next to an entry.

I am choosing to focus on my 10^t, 9^th, and my 3^rd entries. Of these 3 entries my favorite one is my 10^th; this entry was the first I did for Dracula. For this entry I had looked at original of vampires. This is my favorite as I find the origins of things very interesting, and vampires had a lot of possible origins. I described 4 in my entry and made the unfortunate decision to try to draw my interpretation of what a strige would look like, it did not come out good. Even through the drawing didn’t turn out like I wanted it did help me visualize how it would look a bit better.

The second entry I wanted to highlight is my 9^th, which is the second entry I did for the beetle. For this I looked into how shapeshifting fit into Egyptian mythology. This is probably my second favorite entry as I find Egyptian mythology interesting. This has been a trend that has followed me since elementary school, kid me thought it was cool that they had different gods and creatures with supernatural abilities. Current me also thinks that Egyptian mythology, along with Greek, is interesting.

The third entry I choose was my 3^rd entry, this was the first entry I did on Jane Eyre. This was also in the period of time that I didn’t really know what I was doing. This is by no means my best entry but I wanted to look at it because it is the first entry that I decided to draw. I had drawn a scene from the book that I could picture really well while reading. In the entry I had said I sketched it as Jane also liked to draw, I didn’t really write much more of interest or importance in this entry. Another reason this isn’t my best entry is because its not a drawing I spent a lot of time on, this means the drawing doesn’t look the best but here is the drawing I did.

            Keeping a common place book in this class was an interesting experience for me, I had never kept a journal of any kind before this. The closest thing I have is a few sketch books, but I don’t think these have the same effect on my thinking that a common place book did. This experience had me thinking about books in a different way than I have in the past. Specifically, the action of having to connect the books to something else made me think more about how past beliefs and myths contribute to literature. This isn’t something I had ever considered in depth while reading all the books I have in my life. Due to this I think this is the major contributor to my difficulties in the beginning of writing this book. Another difficulty I had was just the number of possible connections I had to sort through in my thinking. This is why my earlier entries are just thoughts and theories I had while reading, I had a hard time pinning one down and just connecting it with other sources.

            As valuable as I think keeping a common place book was for me, I don’t think I will keep a book in the future. I will certainly be considering mythological backgrounds of the books I read in the future, but writing a book isn’t something that really jives with me. I am not the kind of person who likes to write, although I may consider doing sketches or drawings that are somehow connected to the books I read. Drawing helps me to visualize things more and the time I spend on a drawing gives me a lot of time to think through things. I would have done something more like that for this common place book but unfortunately drawing something I like the look of takes me a long time and was not a viable option for the time I had. Despite me not wanting to continue keeping a book I do want to do more looking into mythologies, this book actually helped me to remember how interesting I find them.