Do you ever wish you could remember what you read a year ago or two years ago or five years ago? I’m not talking about content but simply titles.
I have a poor memory to begin with, but add in six children, homeschooling, writing, home-making and all of its aspects of cleaning-decorating-decluttering, church obligations, plus other responsibilities I can’t remember right now { 😊 }, and I can barely remember what books I read last year. Can I get an amen?
So what does every forgetful person do to remember something? Write it down.
A few years ago, I started keeping a reading journal. The children quickly decided they wanted to keep one as well. {How can I express the regret I felt that I hadn’t been keeping track of my reading since childhood? SIGH!}
It’s a terrific way to keep track of what and how much you read, and the journal is a cute reminder I keep on my bookshelf.
Mine is fairly simple. I write down six things about each book I finish ~
Title
Author
The date I completed it
The number of pages
The genre
A star rating based on a basic five-star scale
Sometimes, I’ll jot down a sentence or two, such as why I particularly loved it or why my children should or shouldn’t read it.
I have found three benefits to keeping this reading journal ~
You can track what genres you read most. I genre-hop a lot in my reading, and sometimes it’s interesting to go back and see which genres I’ve been reading during different periods of my life.
You can track how much you read. When you can tally up exactly how many books you read last year, it can be either a great reward (Yay, you’re an avid reader!) or a great motivator (My goodness, you need to read more, girl!).
You have an historical record of your years. Lots of people journal or keep diaries, and despite the fact that I’m a writer, I’ve never been good at that in my adult years. But when I look back and see that I read a book on WITSEC, I know that I was researching for a suspense novel just then. When I see the entry of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Won’t Stop Talking, I know that that was a period when I was learning more about myself and figuring out how I fit into the world around me. If you’d like, you could include a few sentences about what the book meant to you or how it spoke to you at that point in your life.
If you really want to go all techno-geek about it (and I’m tempted, so that’s probably coming in the future), you can create an Excel spreadsheet and then insert formulas so that it will automatically add up how many books you’ve read, how many pages you’ve read, etc. How about a pie chart of genres read? What about a graph of pages read year by year? The possibilities are endless!
I also include my own books in my reading journal, since by the time I call them done, I’ve actually read them each several times.
If you’d like to add any of my books to your own reading journal, you can find information with buy links on the My Books page.
