A Look Inside My Reading Journal

If you've been around my blog for a bit, you'll know I love notebooks and journaling. This year I decided to start a reading journal for fun and I've enjoyed having it. I thought you guys might enjoy seeing what I did.

The journal I picked was given to me by my grandparents several years ago. It's kind of big, which is why I haven't found a purpose for it until now. It's got lined pages and a cute plaid cover.

I started by making this simple cover page with my Tombow dual brush pen. I wanted this whole thing to be as easy and simple as possible, so I would have no excuse not to use it. That's why I only wrote the words "reading journal" and put a little book doodle.

Side note: because I use so many notebooks, more than I probably should, I know the key is simplicity. Make your notebooks and easy and intuitive as you have to to keep yourself from stopping using them.

Next is my 2020 reading goals. Here I've written how many books I want to read, along with any specific reading goals I have, such as ten classics and re-reading the Lord of the Rings.

At the bottom of the page was some more space, so I wrote out what my star ratings mean. Obviously I know what they mean, but I thought it would be good to write down for the future.

To go with my reading goals, I also created this page to write down the non-fiction and classics I read. So far I've done one of each. This way I can make sure I do read them and not forget.

Then I have a page of books to request from the library. Here I can jot down any books I want to request, most likely soon, rather than just randomly grabbing from my Goodreads TBR.

I'm always getting new book suggestions from people on Instagram and such, so I added this page of books to check out. Then I can hopefully remember to look them up on Goodreads and see if I want to find them. (Sadly, my library has too few indie and smaller published books for my taste.)

An important page I wanted to add was a DNF (did not finish) page. I'm not very good about not finishing books, but when I do decide to stop reading them, I plan to write down the title and why I didn't finish it here. Maybe I'll come back in the future and try some of them again, maybe I won't.

And now we get to the reading log itself. I've been logging my reading for years through various means, but this gives me a place to put more info than just the title. I've got it divided by month, with a monthly total of books read at the end.

For each book, I write down the title, author, star rating, when I finished, and a few lines on my thoughts. I use Goodreads as well, but I enjoy physically writing down my reads, to help me remember them better. It's not much, but it works for me.

So there you have it. I'll probably add some stats at the end of the year, but so far this is working quite well for me. Feel free to use what I've done to make your own reading journal.

How do you track your reading? Do you have a reading journal or log? Tell me in the comments.

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