Tell me about your reading journals

In 2018, I started a reading journal.

In 2018, I started a reading journal. The idea was simple: I would record every book I read in its pages.

Immediately, complications arose. What does ‘read’ mean, exactly? If you read the majority of a book but decide the rest is not worth your time, should you include it? What is a ‘book’, anyway? I have an edition of The Four Chinese Classics. Are these classics one book now simply because they have been bound together? The choices didn’t matter much in the long run, but I needed to make them.

Here is what I settled on:

• I must read the main contents of the book in order to include it. Introductions, prefaces, postscripts, appendices, interpretive essays, and the like are not mandatory. (Even if they are often worth reading.)

• A book is not simply pages bound together. It is something a reasonable person would refer to when they said ‘I read that.’ So, in the case of The Four Chinese Classics, that counts as four books. If you say you’ve read the Chuang Tzu, no reasonable person will call you a liar on the grounds that you haven’t read the Analects.

Those were the initial matters of policy. Now I had to turn to implementation. That was simple enough: I chose a decent notebook.

Kokuyo Perpanep makes some of my favorite notebooks, and I especially like the Zara Zara paper. The tactile feel is necessary. After trying a few different notebooks, I eventually settled on that.

You might have noticed something odd there: I tried a few notebooks, and then I settled on one. So what happened to all the books I recorded in the other notebooks?

I wrote them down again.

The Belle Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry

I mention all of this because last night I had to switch notebooks. My Kokuya notebooks have bindings that wear out from overuse, and while this has never been a problem before, it turns out it is a problem for a notebook you want to last for decades. I’ve started the process all over again in a notebook I bought from the site paperforfountainpens.com many years ago. That site is now gone (the owner disappeared around 2019 or 2020), and I’m running low on notebooks from them (in a fit of unexplained prescience, I stocked up). This is hardback, with Tomoe River paper, and I think it could be my final journal.

This means I have to write all of the books out again, by hand. That’s a lot of books, since I’ve had this journal since 2018. It also gives me a chance to reflect on what I want to do differently going forward. Here’s what I’ve settled on now:

• I should include books I chose not to finish for good reason. There are many books I can say that I’ve read in large part, even if I decided some section was not worth my time while reading. The art of being selective in what you read needs to be cultivated. And, since this notebook is not shared with anyone, this isn’t a matter of ego; it’s my intellectual chronicle, and those unfinished books are part of that tale.

• I should make those books in some way so that I can recall if I read the book in whole or in part.

• I should write 1-3 sentence reviews of the books to collect my immediate thoughts.

So, starting in 2025, the format of my journal will look a bit different.

Some of you reading this might be thinking that this is all a bit much — why not use some app or site to store this data? If I did that, I’d never have to write it all out by hand ever again. I’d never have to worry about a notebook’s binding wearing out. Digital is clearly superior, so long as you ignore privacy concerns, data corruption, the ever-shifting ecosystem of apps, etc.

But I think that the fact that I have to write it all out by hand is a feature, not a bug. As I revisit this notebook and write all the titles down again, I can see what I’ve read — and I can see how I’ve changed.

Do you keep a reading journal? Do you have some peculiar annotations you include? Have you found that one secret trick book reviewers don’t want us to know? I’d like to hear about it.