What My Reading Log Actually Looks Like

I keep a paper notebook by the chair I read in, nothing fancy, and every time I finish something I write the title, the date I finished it, and usually one word about how it landed. That’s it most of the time. “Ficciones, dense, good.” “Ventus, slow start, worth it.” Some entries have more, if something really got to me I’ll go a paragraph, but the one-word ones outnumber the paragraph ones by a lot, and I’ve made peace with that.

People ask why I don’t use one of the apps for this, and I’ve tried, more than once, and it never sticks. Something about typing into a phone at the end of a day makes the whole thing feel like admin, like I’m updating a spreadsheet instead of closing out a book. The notebook’s slower, which I think is the point, actually, it takes exactly as long as it takes to write four words in pen and I don’t finish faster by using a keyboard, but it feels less like logging and more like marking something down that actually happened to me.

What decides what I read next is less organized than the log itself, honestly. Sometimes it’s a straight line, I finish one Peter Watts book and go looking for the next thing in that vein. Sometimes it’s whatever a friend hands me, that’s how the Uexküll book happened, somebody doing grad work in philosophy insisted I’d get something out of it even without the background, and she was right. And sometimes, more than I’d probably admit if you asked me directly, it’s just whatever’s sitting closest to the chair when I sit down. I have to admit that a lot of my reading list gets decided by proximity instead of any grand plan, and I’m not entirely proud of that.

I went back through the log a few months ago, actually sat down and read the whole thing front to back instead of just adding to it, and the thing that struck me wasn’t any pattern in what I read, it was how uneven the gaps are. Some months there’s an entry every week. There was a stretch last winter with nothing logged for almost six weeks, and I don’t even remember why, work got busy probably, or I just wasn’t in the mood, and there’s no record of the reason because the log only tracks what I finished, not what I didn’t.

I like that about it now, actually, even though it bothered me at first. It’s not a habit tracker trying to guilt me into consistency. It’s just a record, gaps and all, of what actually got read, in whatever order it actually happened.