I made my first reading journal and here’s how I did it!
Step-by-step guide!
Step 1:
easiest step is to choose your notebook. It should be as long as you want, I choose a smaller size, roughly 75 pages.
Step 2:
template. This step is important, as it is the overall design for your reading journal. I took inspiration from pinterest/google/youtube to see how others styled it. I separated two pages of my notebook and drew a black line through each half to separate the sections.
A template will usually have:
PAGE ONE OF TWO:
Reading Stats: consisting of a genre tracker and target age for the books you read, you can cut any of the stats out if you don’t feel like tracking it. They have a star counter, graphs to count pages, gender of the authors. I have cut those out myself, as pages don’t really matter to me and I tend not to look into the authors (and if I do it is there other works and not personal information).
DNF (did not finish) counter: I added this one myself, as I am curious and have been said to be a harsh reader, it’s nothing fancy but the whole point of making a reading journal is to check progress and to make it fun for you. If you don’t care about DNF’s, skip it.
Fun Meter: as above, I tend to be harsher on books and university has trained me to read fast and not enjoy what I read (lots of periodicals and academic journals).
Genre: this is a rough breakdown of which types of books you are reading.
Library Books: this seems to be a crucial section, it doesn’t have to be borrowed books (I would recommend though) but most of the templates had a section where you write and draw a simple book. I think a lot of the journals like to have a section for visuals, this way it’s not just writing, it looks better and personalized. Trust me it doesn’t have to be fancy. This will take up the two bottom halves of the pages; you do not need to fill these up, but leave yourself space for more books.
PAGE TWO OF TWO:
On the opposite page is the written tracker.
Line chart: that looks something like this:
Book series | Star Rank | Author |
I.e, Hogfather | 4/5 | Terry Pratchett |
It will fill half of the page.
Step 3:
After you have all the information, it is time to personalize! Colour, stickers, washi tapes, anything to make it yours. If you need examples, check out mine or the templates you look at might have colour tips.
Final Thoughts:
Obviously, this is just a quick and very basic guide to how to make lists more visual and pretty, it’s all about adjusting the journal to suit you and your style, whether it is with sticks or drawing very intricate designs. All I know is that you should be having fun.
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: this is just a rant, if you want to skip it that’s fine, I was just thinking about this as I worked on the reading journal)
——Let’s Talk About New Year’s Resolutions——
I know most of you won’t read to the end after getting the reading journal guide, but I want to rant a little about New Year’s Resolutions. To put it simply, they are a weapon cleverly disguised as a tool for productivity. Every year, we are asked (by parents, relatives, colleagues, strangers, etc.) what our resolutions will be for the year; the practice itself is not bad just twisted over time. We are told to resolve our lives, to think of our lives in terms of completing arbitrary tasks which when left uncompleted make us feel like failures.
I do think there is utility in making a list of potential activities or goals you have in mind for the year, to be mindful of where you want to direct yourself, but it’s become a very rigid and negative over the years. Society throughout the generations has placed an emphasis on doing to brag. It has stopped being about challenging yourself to move outside of your comfort zone and more about how many things you can brag about in gatherings.
Setting manageable and reasonable goals is beneficial to enjoying life, as I said, it gives you movement. I think I used to like making resolutions, I used to take out my markers and jot down ridiculous plans I hoped to do but knew I would never achieve. But it was fun, it was a white lie I could tell myself to keep going—to strive for something I perceived as ‘more’—and forget about within a week. It felt like completing a ritual; first, you make a list, then you think about the list, then you forget. Or maybe it felt nice to share ideas with my friends, sharing in our plans for the future.
I probably sound very ‘shakes fist at clouds’ and who knows, maybe a lot of you don’t feel this way about making resolutions and haven’t been constantly badgered by social media for not doing enough despite living in the worst consequential times. I can’t forget the pandemic isolation, the war scares, then war escalation, everything in America threatening to bleed into the rest of the world, global warming, global warming deniers making it worse, inflation, housing prices sky-rocketing, job market crashing, everything else going on that no one could possibly keep up-to-date on without breaking down, and just losing every opportunity to be a kid before society pushed every problem into my generations hands and said good luck.
