New stationery is absolutely beautiful, but it can also cost a lot of money. If you’re like me and keep collecting journals but don’t use them up, a reading journal can be a great way to use up some space! Although there are some gorgeous custom made ones on Etsy, I’ve found that a normal old journal works just as well for recording my thoughts on what I’m reading. If you want to make some more space in your journal drawer and also start ensuring you do remember what you read, this might be for you!
A reading journal can be especially valuable if you happen to read a lot — it can be a place where you keep notes as you read, or after you read (which is what I do!) so that you remember everything that happened in just about anything you read. In addition to being a great tool for you, if you keep one you are actually keeping a valuable piece of history! Most researchers of reading habits don’t have records of how everyday people reacted to books, so by recording your thoughts you might eventually be a tool for cultural anthropologists to further understand the reading habits of our present time! Don’t let this deter you from talking in detail about how much you loved the smut in your latest read.
Keeping a reading journal is honestly very easy, because it’s all up to how you want to use it. I use a Compendium notebook I got at Target, some Zebra mildliners and my favorite ballpoint pen. I like to divide my reading by month, so I make a little heading in a different color on the 1st of every month and keep track of my reading from there. Each book gets its own paragraph (but if you’ve got a lot to say, go ahead and use pages!). I highlight the name and author of the book, and take note of the genre(s) of the book and the format I read it in — audiobook, ebook, or hard copy. I also take a note of my star rating of the book, but if you’re not a rater you don’t have to include that at all!Â
Once my heading here is complete, I begin my thoughts. Usually I have about two small reviews a page, keeping track of what I liked or didn’t like about a book in a more or less small paragraph. Sometimes, especially if a book is shorter, I will only jot down the main things I took away from the book — normally this applies to philosophy books, or short readings I do for class. If it’s a political nonfiction book, or fiction, then my reviews tend to be much longer and I go exactly into what my reading experience was like or how I engaged with the piece. I try to update it as soon as I can so my thoughts are still fresh, but sometimes if I’m delayed in getting my thoughts down it’s interesting to see what stuck in my mind the longest!
However, this is just how I do it. There are so many ways that others I know keep reading journals; some go completely in-depth with pros and cons of each book; some cut out actors they think would play these characters in a movie adaptation; and others simply keep track of the title and when they read the book. There’s no right or wrong way to keep a reading journal ultimately — although there are numerous tutorials on how to set up a reading journal, only you can decide what you want to put into it, and get out of it. So if you’re a sticker-bomb kind of person, or if you’d rather keep everything neat and tidy with colored pencils and highlighters, make sure you have fun with it — and, most importantly, fill the pages of that notebook with all the books you’re reading!