Keeping a reading journal

A reading journal is a private record of what you read and what it did, and it is most useful when it stays short enough to keep up. Every abandoned journal was abandoned for the same reason: the entry format was more work than the reading it recorded.

What to record

Four things carry almost all the value. The title, the dates, one sentence about what the book did, and one sentence about the circumstances in which it was read. The last of these is the one most often left out and the one that makes the record useful later, because a book's effect is inseparable from the month in which it was read.

Everything beyond those four is optional and should be added only if it will still be added in six months. Ratings, page counts, format, source and mood tags are all reasonable; five of them together is usually the point at which the habit stops.

Keeping entries short

A two-sentence entry written the day a book is finished is worth more than a page written three weeks later, and far more than the page that was intended and never written. If a book deserves more, it will get more, and that is a separate act rather than the standard format.

What it becomes

After a year the record starts answering questions that memory cannot. Which months were heavy and which were empty, which subgenres actually got read as against which were bought, which recommendation sources produced books that were finished. None of that is visible from a shelf, and all of it is visible from a plain dated list.

It also produces a reliable answer to the question of what to read next, since the entries about circumstance tend to identify the conditions in which reading went well.

Paper or a file

Paper is faster to write and pleasant to keep. A file is searchable and sortable, which is what makes the year-end questions easy to answer. Either works; what fails is a system split across three places, where the record is never complete enough to consult.

Not a performance

A journal kept for anyone else becomes a review column and inherits the pressure of one. Kept privately it can be blunt, unfinished and occasionally wrong about a book, which is exactly what makes it accurate about the reading. The value is in the record, not in the writing.