Happy New Year! My favorite January tradition is treating myself to a fresh new notebook. A friend asked our group what our best notebooks are, and that question was a gift because I have thoughts.

Here’s what I said.

How do you use your notebook and what do you need from it? When my notebook is my daily driver, I am really hard on it. I take it with me everywhere and fill it cover to cover. I don’t want to worry about damaging it or be precious about losing it or caring for it. I want it to be easy and feel great to write in every time I have something to get out of my head. Like all great tools, the best notebook makes me want to use it.

My ideal notebook must: lay flat while open, stay closed while bouncing around my bag, have a wayfinder to my current page, not be too big or too small, look great, and feel good in my hands. The pages have to be thick enough to handle my favorite pen and not bleed or press through ink. A notebook gets bonus points if it has perforated pages to tear out, a folder inside the cover to store bits of paper, and if its pages are numbered. I like a generous header, footer, and margin on the pages, too.

When I’m in fulltime pen-and-paper mode, I grind through several $10-$30 notebooks a year, and re-buy the ones I want to use again. Here are a few notebooks I’ve enjoyed filling in recent years. (No sponsors or affiliate links here—just notebooks I’ve loved.)

I just received a Hokusai: The Great Wave Artisan Art Notebook as a holiday gift. The soft vegan leather cover is etched with one of my favorite pieces of art in the world, and feels great to hold. The wave on the page edges really got me, too. This is a notebook I do want to take care of, so it mostly stays at home and I’m using it for morning pages.

MOO’s hardcover notebooks come with a hard case and I beat the heck out of mine on my daily NYC commute and they took no damage. I kept the cover in my bag and slid it in when I was heading out the door. I don’t know how they made the binding, but this is the only hardcover notebook I’ve used that actually lays flat when open.

Poppin’s medium softcovers feel nice in hand and have fun solid colors. The first one I used was a freebie that came with a Poppin office furniture order, and I assumed it would be a low-end throwaway. Turns out I really liked how compact and put together it was, and I wound up buying more to use as my daily work planner and note-taker once I finished the first one. I’ve filled several of these but my commute did do some damage to the edges of the soft covers by the time I got to the last page.

The Mnemosyne A5 is a smart spiral-bound option, which absolutely lays flat. It has nice roomy page header, and subtle thick lines separate the pages into thirds, which helps you draw things like a weekly layout. The pages are also perforated so you can tear them out. This notebook does not come with a bookmark, which I missed very much. I stuck a ribbon in there myself and it worked but it was janky.

When I was full-on bullet-journaling I used several regular non-branded notebooks—which all work, to the credit of the non-proprietary system—but the “official” Leuchtturm 1917 bullet journal saved me the time of numbering pages and building the index and yearly view pages.

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There are a lot of beautiful, high-end notebook systems online and I’m tempted by them all. Then I’ll be standing in the school supplies aisle at my local drugstore and remember that when you love the feeling of pen on paper, a $6 marble composition book will call to you, too.

Happy New Year!