Hi Guys

Do any of you keep reading journals? You know, perhaps something along the lines of a notebook that you have to hand to make notes, comments, quotes etc from the book that you a reading? I havent done this but seems like a neat idea.

Cheers

I have thought about it, but I have never done one. I wish that I had though... all of tose great books that I have read and forgotten.

I generally search for discussions here on LT about books I'm reading if I want to talk about them (go to the work page, then to the "discussions" tab on the left), and I track my reading and have great convos about the books I'm enjoying on my reading challenge thread (50 book challenge, 75 book challenge, 9-9-09 challenge, 1001 book to read before you die, tbr challenge; the options are endless!).

I wish I'd kept a reading ledger before LibraryThing, but now that I'm "keeping tabs," this site has loads of options for tracking and elaborating on the books I read; if you'd like further direction to threads where you can find the same, just let us know what, in particular, might be of interest.

Happy hunting!

I recently experienced a language website / blog that I followed for years that lost all data. No back ups either.

If that happened to LT?

(shivers)

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Maio 5, 2009, 3:16am.

That would surely be miserable for LesMiserables! :)

I've kept a reading journal since 2000. I record the books I'ver read in a notebook. It's in shabby condition, but no one else would probably be interested in it, and I'm a complete technophobe.

I'm waiting for the day someone says to me, "Quick! Name the third book you read in October, 2004!" I will be ready.

I made a book journal last year for the first time. I really found it useful in keeping track of not only books I read but of my TBR books also. The one I made for this year I added a website page to keep notes on the various book sites I visit.

I used to keep a journal of read books and wishlist books. Now everything is here.

*shudders at the thought of losing LT*

I never really ever considered book journaling before reading about it on LT. Now I can see the attraction, but I use LT for that purpose. I write reviews as well as making comments on plots, quotes I like and so on in my comments section.

I agree, if something ever happened to LT.....
:(

#6 Quillmenow - I know exactly where you are coming from, I have a list of every book I have read since 1978. I too wish someone would ask me to name the books I read in October, 2004!

Miss Delta Queen. I have to ask you a question.

What books did you read in May of 2001?

# 11 Quillmenow - why I am so glad you asked!

The Stranger From the Sea by Winston Graham
Monster by Jonathon Kellerman
Skinner's Round by Quintin Jardine
Blue At The Mizzen by Patrick O'Brian
The Death Pit by Tony Strong
Harm Done by Ruth Rendall

Now - Quick! Name the first two books you read in May of 2005

After that I promise to return the thread to its' original purpose! :)

>10
Wouldn't that be a fun thread.

Oh, no. I have mine arranged by authors followed by the month and year read. I can only tell you all the books I read in May of '05.

The Second Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders
Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve
True Believer by Nicholas Sparks
The Warfield Bride by Bronwyn Williams
Dead in the Water by Stuart Woods

I started a bookjournal in 2004, and it was the ocd that this caused that lead me to go looking for a more tech solution - I started by making my own datamodel and design an application, but when I found LT I decided the time was better spent reading, and I'd just live with the details that weren't how I wanted them.
I never left the hardcopy version journal behind due to the difficulty of keeping track of when I first read an author, and how many times I have read a particular book (this is now possible, but it weren't).

Reading October 2004, courtesy of my reading journal:

Idlewild by Nick Sagan
Fantasy Life by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Echo by Francesca Lia Block
Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille by Steven Brust
All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland
Second Nature by Alice Hoffman

It is interesting how vividly I remember reading those books and what I thought at the time, and then realising that it happened so many years ago.

May, 2005

A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Circle of Friends by Mauve Binchy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

This was fun! Slightly off topic, but fun!

I'd just like to say that I am so impressed by all of you reading diarists! I wish I had done something similar. Is it too late to start, here on a random Wednesday in May? It seems like something one ought to do on January 1st.

It's never too late to start. I started mine April of '03. Anything before that I tagged pre '03.

#17

Start now since we're into a new month! It's never too late in the year to start. The sooner the better.

I think it's very interesting how many of us keep these lists. I bet if a survey was done, a large percentage of LT members probably keep lists or reading journals. I come from a family of readers, and when we get together at Christmas every year, out come our lists, we compare each others and discuss books we have in common and how we rated them. It's a family tradition, wine and books lists, and lots of laughter!

>4 and others

Quick! Go to the Tools tab in the upper right hand corner and the 2nd topic on the far right column is Import/Export...export your library from time to time and then you will have a backup copy on your computer should anything dire ever happen to LT.

I try to create backups at least quarterly. Also, it is very easy to manipulate the information once it is in excel or some other spreadsheet so you can print out all or portions of your list whenever a paper copy would be useful.

The export is pretty easy but if anyone wants a little extra guidance just post a comment on my profile and I will be happy to assist.

Thanks CarolO that was very helpful and so easy to do.

You're welcome!

My idea of a reading journal is more of a notebook for jotting down those little (or big) ideas and musings you take from a book as you read it. Your mental meanderings, if you like. Not so much a clinically correct correspondence of current criticism.

I started keeping a book list/log in April 2008, so it's been about a year now, and I'm glad that I started it. I wish I had started it earlier, but better late than never.

I wanted to keep a log because I read voraciously, and I had noticed that once I'm done with a book, and I'm on to the next one, I can't for the life of me even remember the name of the title and author of the just finished book. I know it's strange, but once I've become immersed in a new book, the old one tends to quickly become history no matter how enjoyable it was.

Then, when people came to me and asked me for book recommendations, I couldn't give any because I couldn't remember the names of the books. That was my primary impetus for getting a list going.

I don't have a fancy list. I just created a table in a Word document. There are 3 columns. One for title, one for author, and one for the month and year that I finished the book.

Now that I have this list, I also have a general idea about how many books I read in a month and in a year.

I keep a list of all the books I read in a year as I set myself a 52 book challenge as part of my New Year Resolutions. It's nice to keep track as I'm likely to forget otherwise! : )

I started keeping track of books read here on LT last year for the 75 book challenge.

I've also tagged every book I have on LT, all 3009 of them, with "read, started, tbr, or ntbr" so I can tell you that of the books in my house right now, I've read 1438.

But that doesn't count library books, books loaned and never returned, books lost by the post office in 1980 when I moved back from Connecticut to California, books bought then given away, or books borrowed and returned.

Ah well, next lifetime.

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Maio 13, 2009, 4:20pm.

jamberrypie, I have the same problem. I can only remember the particulars of a book if it was very good or very bad. A lot of books I can tell you if I liked them or not but I can't tell you the plot. Then there are the very mediocre, usually fluff. They just blend together.

the club read group is precisely that - a place for you to record what you read, when and how you felt about it. Other people might even stop by to offer suggestions and their thoughts.

LT's data is "safe" on 5 independant back-up servers according to TIM. it's not the data that you could lose, merely access to it for a while.

I have been better since joining LT. More discussion =more retention, I guess. A lot of books don't deserve remembering. :) I joined the 75 book challenge last year and most members write a little review of each book they read. I always say I'm going to start doing that but so far...........

cal8769 - Exactly. Everything (characters, storylines, etc.) all seem to get fuzzily blended together in my mind after awhile, especially when I'm in a heavy-duty reading mode. The problem is more pronounced when I finish a book and immediately start up with a brand new one seconds later.

So, keeping a log has been working out well for me. I can sometimes go back a few months in my log to see what I was reading then, and seeing the titles and authors in black and white really does help me to jog my brain to bring back the plot line for a particular book.

Yeah I started making a note of what I had read here... http://sites.google.com/site/meraciousin...

But what I mean with a journal more in the old fashioned sense for keeping by the bed or in your jacket for noting the odd note or quotation from a book...... nothing so neat as an excel file!!!!

Everyone to their own I suppose :-)

I started keeping track on LT in late 2006. I use tags to keep track - so if I read a book in April 20007, it'll be tagged "2007" and "april 2007." Also, this year I've been posting in the 50 Book Challenge community on Livejournal, and I write my thoughts about each book in a Word file first and then post it to the community. I like having the more detailed information about each book, and especially what I thought about them; I think it'll be interesting to look over several years from now, or if I end up rereading any of those books. I can't imagine doing it by hand though - with how much I read, all that writing would drive me nuts! Plus, the notebook would fill up really fast.

I'm new to LT, so don't know much yet about what tagging is and how to go about tagging books. I like the idea of tagging the books with a date. I'm assuming that the most commonly used tags are the ones that define the genre of the book?

You're right, jamberry. Genre and form. When you are cataloging your new books, there is a line labeled "tags" where you can enter whatever tags make you happy and/or organized. Also found on "edit page"

Oops. Impatient "submit" finger.

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Maio 21, 2009, 3:19pm.

#35 (MerryMary), could you explain a little more about what is meant by tagging for "form"?

I've been keeping my reading list in a Word document file for over a year now. I'm thinking I should print out the list and start inputting them into LT while I still have an idea what the books are still about.

I have tags for "poetry," "cartoons," "memoirs," "graphic novel," stuff like that. Form might not be the right word. Format?

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Maio 21, 2009, 4:55pm.

I write notes about characters, locales, time lines of the book I am currently reading on the book mark and sometimes fly pages.

I started my lo-tech hard-copy journal in a little black moleskine notebook.
First book to grace its pages The Outsider by Albert Camus.

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Maio 23, 2009, 11:21pm.

I have a small notebook that I use to jot down what I've read. I only write the title and author of the book. Nothing more. Not even the month, just in number order by year. I'm so glad I've done it. There is something tangible about holding a journal in my hands and seeing that yes, I have read Reading Lolita in Tehran and documented my survival.

I have tried keeping reading journals but have never managed to keep one up. I really regret not having a permanent record of what I read when and am constantly looking for a way to do it. For the moment my threads on here are keeping a record.

I'm going to try and keep one while I lead a series read over on Hogwarts Express through August (Terry Brooks's Magic Kingdom of Landover series, if anyone's interested!). I tend to abandon them in favor of just reading, but I really need to get in the habit of annotating, particularly as I take more lit courses.

One of the ladies that works at the bookstore told me that the first thing she does when she gets a new book home is to put a sticky note in the front. She writes the name and author of the book on the note. Then when she starts to read it she'll write the start date. When she has finished she'll put the end date and any notes she wants to make and puts the note into a notebook. If she doesn't like the book she'll jot down a few reason why and leave the note in the book for the next time she tries to read it. I'm giving the method a try.

Well, you guys have inspired me. I've just bought a new notebook to serve as a reading journal - not yet removed from the cellophane. It kind of feels a bit late at 24, having already read 80 of the 1001 books over the past 10 years or so - but here's hoping I've got years and years of reading to come! Now to work out a format for each entry (I'm OCD enough to fret about these things...)

Be sure to catalog your reading journal ;-)

#45
It took me a while to find the right format for my bookjournal entries - using my calendar, oneliners, pages - and I obsess whenever I forget to or can't conform to it. Nevertheless these less than perfect notebooks, with very different types of entries and their clear signs of having been used under harsh conditions (wine stains, wear and tear) are far better than none:-)
I've seen bookjournals that are prefilled with a form on each page, where you just fill out blanks. Although they seemed very nice, they were too constricted for me.

That's interesting as I've yet to find a template of anything that satisfied all of my nuances and quirks ")

I created my own pages to suit my needs. I have three different sections and made my own journal. But you can create the page the way you want and have Kinko's or Office Max print them up for you, and they will even bind them the way you want. My sister has her journal done that way.

Like some others, I use small notebooks. I started in 2005. Among other things, they refresh my memory on plots and characters, and they also help when it's gift-giving time and I'm looking for something good I've read that would suit a particular person.

In the past I haven't put in dates, but I like the idea after reading the entries by DeltaQueen50 and quillmenow and others, so I started that today.

You gave me a great idea of making a note on the page when I think someone would enjoy a book. Thanks.

ahh! Good idea. I actually wasn't doing it that way, but I like it (I was just going back later and looking through). I'm going to start doing that myself.

There is a cool site to create aPocket Mod which is a small journal page you can print on a single sheet of paper. Do a google search on "Hipster PDA" and dig around there are some nice tools to create journal pages.

Thanks for the site info. I love the Pocket Mod. I just made one for my book shopping list, by printing on both sides I have 16 pages out of one sheet of paper.