How to Start a Reading Journal

Start with five fields: title, author, date started, date finished, rating. That is a complete reading journal. It takes fifteen seconds per book, it survives a busy month, and after a year it can answer almost every question you will actually ask of it. Everything else — quotes, reviews, mood ratings, coloured spines, page counts — is worth adding, but only after the five-field habit has held for a couple of months.

Reading journals fail for one reason. Someone sets up a beautiful two-page spread per book, reads four books, falls two books behind on the writing-up, and then stops reading rather than face the backlog. The journal became homework attached to the hobby.

The five fields, and why each earns its place

Title and author. Obvious, and the reason you will never again buy a book you have already read.
Date started. The field people skip, and the one that makes the journal interesting later. Without it you cannot see how long anything took.
Date finished. With the start date, this gives you days-per-book, which is the single most revealing number in the whole journal.
Rating. Five stars, ten points, or three buckets — it does not matter, as long as you use the same scale all year. A rating you can compare beats a rating that is precise.

Write the entry when you start, not when you finish. Half a row is easier to complete than a whole one, and it means a book you abandon still leaves a trace.

What to add once the habit sticks

Field	The question it answers
Page count	How much did I actually read, not just how many books
Format	Do I finish paper, ebook or audio more reliably?
Source	Library, bought, borrowed, gift — worth knowing before you buy more
Genre	Am I reading what I think I am reading?
Two-sentence review	Will I remember this book in a year?
Did not finish	Why I stopped, which stops you re-borrowing it
Recommended by	Whose recommendations actually land

Add one at a time. A journal that grows a column every few months stays alive; one that starts with twelve columns does not.

Paper, app, or spreadsheet

	Strength	Weakness
Paper notebook	Pleasant, no screen, no login	Cannot sort, count or total anything
Reading app	Automatic covers, social features	Your data lives in someone else’s product
Spreadsheet	Sorts, counts and charts itself; yours forever	You have to build it, or start from one

The honest split: paper is best if the pleasure of writing it is the point; a spreadsheet is best if you want the year to add up at the end. Many people run both, and there is nothing wrong with that — a notebook for the two-sentence reviews and a sheet for the counting.

A year, read back

Here is what twelve months of five-field entries actually produced for one reader:


Books finished	34
Average length	312 pages
Total pages	10,608 — about 29 pages a day
Average days per book	9.4
Longest gap with nothing finished	23 days, in July
Did not finish	5
Fiction share	62%
From the library	71%
Average rating	3.8

Three of those lines changed how the next year went. The 23-day July gap turned out to be one 600-page book that was not being enjoyed and was not being abandoned either — the reader now abandons at page 80. The 71% library share made a case for stopping buying books that were never opened. And the 3.8 average rating was too high to be informative, which is what happens when you only finish books you already expect to like; the scale got recalibrated.

None of that required a paragraph per book. It came out of five columns and a sort.

Writing a review you will still understand in a year

Two sentences, written within a day of finishing:

What it was actually about — not the plot, the thing underneath it.
What you would tell a friend — including who you would not recommend it to.

Skip the summary. The internet has summaries. What no one else has is why you kept reading, or why you nearly stopped, and that is the sentence that will still be useful when the title has gone fuzzy.

Common questions

Do I log books I did not finish? Yes, with a DNF mark, the page you stopped at, and one line of why. It is the most useful category in the journal: it stops you borrowing the same book twice, and after a year the pattern in your DNF list tells you something quite specific about what you actually like.

What do I do about re-reads? A new row, with a note that it is a re-read. Comparing your rating on a second reading against the first is one of the few genuinely surprising things a reading journal produces.

I have not logged anything since March. Do I start over? No — start today, and leave the gap in. A journal with a hole in it is a record of a real year. A journal restarted from scratch every time it lapses never gets old enough to tell you anything, and the whole value of this is in the second and third year, not the first.