Skip to main content

My reading journal

I have been keeping a reading journal for about three years now, and it has become a routine for me. I have started writing a regular journal or diary several times, but the only time I have been able to keep it up for longer than a couple of weeks is when I have been travelling, but somehow I have been able to stick to the reading journal, perhaps because it doesn’t call for daily entries. My only regret is that I didn’t start it a long time ago. I have estimated that I have read at least 5000 books in my lifetime – probably more – and it would have been fun to be able to compile a list of them all and to analyse how my reading habits and tastes have changed through the years.

As I mentioned in the January reading report, I decided at the beginning of the year to start keeping the journal in a real book instead of loose-leaf binders, and so far it is working out well. The book has blank pages, so the writing is not always in a completely straight line, but it somehow feels better to be writing in a book than on loose sheets of paper, even if the paper was lined. Of course it feels even better because I actually made the journal.

Into the journal goes some basic information about each book I read: date read, genre, title, author/editor, reader (if an audio book), illustrator/photographer (is there is one), translator (if it’s translated), publisher, year published, country, no of pages, format, a short plot summary and a one line review with star rating. The rating and everything but the summary and short review goes into an Excel file as well, to help me analyse the information statistically.

Well, enough about the contents - here is the journal:

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting


I put some information about how it was made and what materials I used, in my bookbinding blog
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
Post a Comment
Read more