Making my Reading Journal: Creating a Home Library (part 1)

 

In 2021, I read nearly 200 books, and added nearly 200 more to my "want to read" shelf on Goodreads. Needless to say, BookTube and BookTok had given me an inordinately long TBR. However, I kept adding and forgetting about books that I'd add to my "want to read" shelf, then the I'd realize that there were so many that it was getting hard to go through and pick one. As such, my list hardly used as a way to pick a book I'd been wanting to read, and I usually ended up scrolling through Libby or Kindle Unlimited to find a new read. 

Eventually, I tried to compile a smaller "TBR" shelf on Goodreads, where I kept the books I most urgently wanted to read, but most of those ended up being exclusively the genre I wanted to read when I made the list, not always what I wanted to read then Eventually, I had given up on all my GoodReads shelves, really only using the site as a way to track what I'd read so far. So there was my first issue with my GoodRead's shelves--- they were hard to organize in the way I wanted.

Another issue was that I kept forgetting books that I had finished. Like, if I read two different books, fairly close together-- especially if the books were mediocre to begin with-- by the next week I'd be staring at the cover thinking, "now, what happened in that book again?"

All-in-all, it was time for me to find a new way to organize my reading this year, and one day, while scrolling through Pinterest, I came across the perfect solution-- a reading journal. 

A notebook filled with scribbled titles, with different TBR's by genre, ranking's for each of the books I'd read each month and a space to jot down all my personal thoughts about the books, how I read each book, and I can keep the books I read for school in their own list.

So I got to work, beginning with the materials I'd need-- which really ended up being a multipack of coloured felt pens and a nice notebook-- I started creating my journal. I went through a couple notebooks to find the one I ended up keeping, mostly as I tried to find an old one I had lying around and discovering one had had a few too many pages ripped out; another one I worried was too thin. One day, while wandering my local Indigo, I found the perfect solution-- an on-sale Bullet Journal starter kit. A faux-leather claud book, with silver edged pages, a string bookmark, a metal page of stencils and a ruler, and enough spacial freedom to allow me to format the pages as I'd like, it was perfect. 

Secondly, I wanted a dozen, different coloured, felt-tip pens, that I could change colours to create the page format, fill it in, and record my ratings and notes in. I ended up stumbling across some at Walmart that we vibrant enough to stand out, but didn't bleed through the page. In my searching, I also found some tiny magnetic bookmarks, so I grabbed a pack of those as well.

With my materials collected, I could now begin putting together my book and recording my thoughts. After doing a bit more research, I decided I wanted to keep four different lists in my book: My TBR (To Be Read, focused on the books I was most excited for); my DNF (Did Not Finish); my most anticipated releases of the year; and my to-buy list. 

My DNF and to-buy lists are the most straightforward, so we'll start there. I set my book on it's spine, let it fall open to a certain page closer to the front of the book (as it has so many pages I'm hoping to have enough space to use it for 2023, too), labelled the top "DNF", stuck a magnetic bookmark to the top of the page, then rinsed and repeated to pick a page for my to-buy list. As I finish books and love them enough to want to own them, or hate them enough to give up on them part way through, I, respectively, add them to my to-buy list, or my DNF list, as I go. 

As for my most anticipated releases of the year, I keep a running list of books that I was to read that are coming out this year. This list is mostly continuations of series I've already started reading (like Wolff's Court), as opposed to some stand alones and new series beginning this year. 

For my last list-- which kind of ended up being a centralization of several lists-- I'm keeping all the books (regardless of release year) in a list that I organize by genre. Well, kind of. 

I have a handful of lists, of books I want to read, in the genre's I read the most of-- romance, fantasy, mystery, horror/thrillers, literary fiction, and classics-- then I have the "other" list, which is really just being left open as an option and that I feel like by the end of the year will have become a continuation of the aforementioned genres. Last year, when I first started using it, I went through my "want to read shelf" on GoodReads, trying to find a way to sort them by their "tags" or genre, to no avail. So, I decided to organize it this way because when I'm looking for something to read, I usually have an idea of what kind of book I want, but struggle to remember most of the titles that I'm interested in. 

So, I had my lists, but I still wanted to keep track of my month-by-month reading. For that, I decided to do a "cover page" where I could write out my monthly reading target, which books I read, my monthly TBR, any books I needed to read for school that month, and some over all thoughts of the month (like the best and worst reads). 

As I'm writing this, I've already done a couple of months of trial and error, in terms of figuring out what to include and how to format my entries. Even in just two months, I've departed a lot from my "original" vision for it, and I think that's something that's going to continue as I go through the year. I also like the idea of, in like 10 years, just having a box of reading journals and looking through what I've read over the last decade and how my opinions and interests have changed.