Discussion | How I Organise my Reading Journal

Hello my lovely readers. Today I thought I would do a discussion post on my Reading Journal, which I mentioned in my How to track your reading post back in January. I wanted to show you my progress with my reading journal and the array of pages I’ve created.

Last year, if you remember I started a bookish bullet journal. It was more of novelty in the first couple of months and it took quite a lot of time. I really wanted to try again and I saw Vicky’s from What Vicky Read post on her Reading Journal and she inspired me to create my own.

What I will say is this reading journal has been the drive for my blogging and reading. Whilst I love tracking it on Goodreads, I didn’t realise that 5 months into the year just how much I rely on it.

I want to say that so far it’s a life saver for both reading, blogging and bookstgramming. The front half of my journal is the reading side, the other half is my blogging side, where I write my ideas and plan when to post etc. I’ve kept the pages very simple and bright which I like. Nothing overly complicated or what will take the time to create.

How to start your bullet journal…

When I started, I was like, well how do I start, what spreads would be beneficial to me. Like I said earlier, something simple, easy to maintain. In the picture above, is my title page and below is the first couple of pages with my statistics page and goals spread. I borrowed the statistics page from Vicky, I really like tracking the genres I read throughout the year and I really want to try and read more, so it will be interesting at the end just how much I have read. Plus tracking my ratings throughout the year, it looks like so far I’ve had a great reading year so far.

Reading Journal Spreads

  The next pages of my reading journal are my spreads that I use to keep track of ARCS, Books Read, Books Reviewed etc:

• So I have my TBR list which will probably need a new page every few months the way it’s going. As you can see it’s fairly empty but after doing a TBR jar, I have over 150 books, so I’m writing down the ones I want to get reading this year.
• Series to Finish page – recording all the series I need to finish. This is actually quite manageable.
• Books Read and Reviews are as they are, recording all of the ones I’ve done in 2020 so far.
• Series to Finish page – One of my goals this year is to finish loads of series. I have so many and I want to finish them, some are even my favourites, but I get distracted by all the other books.
• ARCs record– all of the Advanced Reading Copies I’ve been lucky enough to be sent. I cross them off as I read them. (I actually need to update this page. Whoops).

Monthly Spreads

When I first started my reading journal, I was experimenting with loads of different monthly spreads especially the page trackers. It took a while but I finally have one I really like. I love the way that one spread can hold all the info I need. What books I’ve read, how long it took me to read them, blog tour reads, monthly reading goals, and bookhaul. It simple, it’s perfect. 

Blogging/Bookstagramming

I have a whole book of empty pages, half of it will take my reading, so why not include my blogging. Here are some of the spreads below – I have to say, this especially has inspired me to draft post ideas, brainstorm, track my posts and how often I post, statistics, plan the week of posts I’m etc. I also include my bookstagramming challenges as well, so it’s really great at organising my blogging life.

I hope you enjoyed this post, I really love my reading journal. I really hope you might find some inspiration in your own reading journal as I did. 

Join in on the conversation… do you have a reading journal/ book bullet journal?