What's Actually in My Reading Log

People are surprised when I tell them I don’t use an app for this. I work in a field that’s basically professional data tracking, tolerances and revision histories and spreadsheets I could probably automate half of if I put in the effort, and then I go home and log what I read in a plain composition notebook with a pen that’s usually not the same pen twice, because I keep losing them in couch cushions.

Started the notebook about five years ago, so a year or so after the game group started, for a boring reason: I kept getting partway into a book, setting it down for two weeks because life happened, and picking it back up with no memory of who anyone was. Not a reading problem exactly, more a “my evenings are unpredictable” problem. Writing down the date I started, roughly where I stopped and why, solved it well enough that I never bothered switching to something fancier.

What’s actually in it, if you flipped through: date started, date finished if I finished it, a line or two, not a review, more like a note to future me. “Slow first hundred pages, worth it.” “DNF, just wasn’t the mood, might retry.” That last tag shows up more than I’d like to admit, there’s a real graveyard of half-read books in there that I’ve never gone back to, and looking at the list honestly is a little humbling.

I don’t rate anything in the notebook itself, that only happens later if I end up writing something up here, and I think keeping those two things separate matters more than it sounds like it should. The notebook’s for me, it’s supposed to be honest in a way that doesn’t care what anyone thinks, no audience to perform for. The second I imagine someone reading it I start second-guessing whether “slow first hundred pages” is fair to the author, and that’s not useful for a private log.

The other thing the notebook’s taught me, going back through old entries, is how much my taste has actually moved without me noticing in the moment. Five years ago it’s almost all fiction, and a lot of the entries from the last year and a half are nonfiction I wouldn’t have picked up back then. I don’t know exactly when that shifted, there’s no single entry where I can point and say “here,” it just crept in, book by book, the way most real change in a person seems to happen without announcing itself.

Forty minutes before bed, most nights, sometimes on flights when work sends me somewhere. Not a big system. Just enough of one that I remember what I read.