How to start a reading journal (and keep it going)

A reading journal is simply a place where your reading leaves a trace. It can be a notebook, a page in an app, or the margins of the book itself. What makes it worth keeping is not how beautiful it looks but that, a year from now, you can open it and remember what a book did to you.

Most book journals stop for the same reason: they ask for too much. A blank double page per book feels like homework. So start smaller than you think.

Decide what kind of journal you want

There are roughly three kinds, and knowing which one you want saves a lot of empty pages.

• A reading log records what you read and when: title, author, dates, maybe a rating. It takes seconds and it is the backbone of the other two.
• A commonplace book collects lines worth keeping: quotes, ideas, words you looked up.
• A reflective journal holds what you thought: how a book made you feel, what you disagreed with, what it reminded you of.

You can mix them, but begin with the log. A journal with a complete list of books and a few good notes beats a journal with three beautiful entries from January.

What to write about each book

Pick three or four of these and use the same ones for every book. Repetition is what makes a journal easy.

1. Title, author, and the dates you started and finished.
2. Why you picked it up: a recommendation, a cover, a mood.
3. One line you want to remember, with its page.
4. One sentence on how it made you feel.
5. What you would tell a friend who asked about it.
6. A rating, if you like ratings. Many people don't, and that's fine.
7. Who you would give it to.

Write during the book, not only at the end

The single best habit is to write while you are still reading. A note on page 80 catches what you actually thought on page 80, before the ending rewrites your memory of the whole book. Three short notes during a book are worth more than one long review after it.

Keep the note next to the page number. Later, those numbers turn a pile of notes into a map of the book. This is how BookWorm's notebook works: each note is pinned to the page, or the minute of an audiobook, where you wrote it, and the notebook reads in page order.

Reading journal page ideas

If you keep a paper journal and enjoy making pages, these come back to life year after year:

• A year of reading days: a square for every day, coloured in when you read.
• A shelf of spines, one drawn for each finished book, coloured by genre.
• A to-read list, with where each recommendation came from.
• Favourite lines of the year.
• Books by month, with the one that stayed with you most.
• Authors you discovered this year.

The printable reading log has the first and the simplest of these ready to print: a list of books, a year of reading days, and a notes page for a single book.

Paper or app?

Paper is slower, and that is its charm: writing by hand makes you choose your words. An app is faster and never left at home, and it can do the counting for you: which days you read, how many pages, how long a book took.

Many readers do both. Let an app keep the log automatically, and keep a small notebook for the lines and thoughts you want to write by hand. Neither has to carry everything.

How to keep a reading journal going

• Lower the bar. A one-line entry still counts. Write the title and a single sentence on a busy day.
• Tie it to your reading. Write when you close the book, not “later this week”. Later rarely comes.
• Keep it where you read. The notebook lives with the book, or the app is one tap away.
• Don't backfill perfectly. If you miss a month, write the titles you remember and move on. A gap is not a failure.
• Reread it. On the first of each month, read last month's entries. That moment of remembering is the reward that keeps you writing.

Your first entry, today

Take the book you are reading now. Write its title, the page you are on, and one sentence about where the story or argument has taken you so far. That's it. You've started a reading journal, and the next entry will be easier than this one.