How to start a book journal without making it a project

What is a book journal?

A book journal is where you write about books after you read them. It is longer than a log entry and more personal than a review. You record what a book made you think about, which lines you want to keep and how you felt at the end. A reading log answers what and when. A journal answers what you made of it.

Search results for the topic are full of elaborate spreads with watercolor headers. That style is a hobby of its own, and a lovely one, but it is optional. The core of a journal is plain: a book, a date and some honest sentences.

What do you need to begin?

Three things, and you probably own them already.

Resist buying a dedicated journal before you know how you like to write. The people who keep a book journal for years usually started in whatever was on the desk. The bullet journal method, developed by Ryder Carroll and shared publicly in 2013, shows how far a plain notebook and short entries can go.

Set a size limit up front. One page per book, or one note of about 150 words, keeps entries from ballooning and keeps the whole journal skimmable. When an entry wants to be longer, let it, but treat that as a bonus and not as the standard you must meet for the next book.

• A notebook, a notes app or a reading app that has a free text field.
• A rule for where each book starts, such as a new page or a new note titled with the book.
• A pen or the thumbs you already use.

Which prompts should you answer?

Prompts remove the blank-page problem. Use the same ones for every book so that entries are comparable later, and answer them fast, before you start editing yourself.

If you have more time, add what you expected before starting and whether the book met it. That one question makes later entries far more interesting to reread.

1. What is this book about, in one sentence of your own?
2. What did you notice that other people did not mention?
3. Which line or scene do you want to keep, and on which page?
4. Who would you give it to, and who would you warn away?
5. Rating, and the date you finished.

What does a good entry look like?

Here is a ten-minute entry for a short novel, written in the order of the prompts.

It is not clever, and that is the point. It will make sense in five years.

Sample: "A lighthouse keeper learns the sea is slower than he is. I noticed how few characters speak, and how loud that makes the weather. Keep: p. 118, the paragraph about the logbook. Give to anyone who likes quiet books. Warn off anyone who needs plot by chapter three. 4 stars, finished Oct 2."

How do you fit it into a normal week?

Journal right after finishing a book, while the ending is fresh, and keep the session short. A timer helps. Set it for ten minutes and stop when it rings.

For books you are still reading, jot only lines and page numbers as you go. Saving a passage takes seconds, while writing about a half-read book takes effort and often changes once the book ends. A simple tab system can mark why a line mattered, and the guide to book tab colors shows one that fits in a legend of four.

Is a book journal the same as a commonplace book?

Not quite, though they are cousins. A commonplace book is a notebook where an owner collects passages, sayings and other things worth keeping, usually sorted under subject headings. People kept them from antiquity through the Renaissance and into the nineteenth century. A journal is chronological and personal, so it is organized by the date you finished each book.

You can borrow from both. Keep the dated page per book, then collect quotes in one place sorted by theme or by tab. That second list is the part you will mine years later when you need a line about courage or about winter.

What if you fall behind?

You will. A three-month gap is normal, and the fix is to restart small. Do not backfill every missing book. Write one line for each of the last three you remember, then carry on from the next one you finish.

Decide in advance that an unfinished journal is still a journal. Half of the value sits in the books you did write about, and the gaps are information too. They show you when life was full, which is a record of its own.

Notebook or app?

Handwriting slows you down in a useful way, and some readers think better with a pen. An app searches faster, backs up and travels in a pocket. The right answer is the one you will open after a long day.

If you choose an app, check three things before you commit: whether you can export your entries, whether it needs an account, and whether quotes can be saved with a page number. Bookstub, an iPhone reading tracker in development, keeps lines of up to 280 characters with the book, the page and a colored tab, and a private note that only you see. Data stays on the phone.

What should you leave out?

Leave out anything that feels like homework. Do not summarize every chapter, do not force a rating scale you do not believe in, and do not write about books you quit unless you want to. Leaving a book is allowed. A single sentence on why you stopped is often the most useful entry in the journal.