This year, I decided to create a reading journal in order to be a little more creative with how I track my reading progress throughout the year. In January, I posted some of my set-up pages which I included at the beginning of my journal in order to give an overview of my year. Every month, I plan to give updates on what my pages look like for the month.
Below, I have included my video from TikTok where I showed all of the pages which I created in January:
January Overview
Every month, I would like to do a monthly overview where I track different statistics, list books on my TBR, and document other important information (such as new releases). For January, I did a blue, mint green, and purple color scheme to go with the cold temperatures in January. While I really liked my calendar, next month, I plan to put a larger difference between the colors in the key so it is easier to differentiate how much I read in a day. One of my goals this year is to check more books out of the library, so I created a graph to document my progress.
The American Roommate Experiment by Elena Armas
I had so much fun creating my first book spread! The cover of at first, I was going to stick with my January theme colors throughout the month, but I decided that I liked it much better when I leaned into the colors on the cover of the book. The American Roommate Experiment is pink and blue, so those were the colors that I utilized. That being said, in later spreads, I started to include a song that I associate with the book, which I didn’t do for The American Roommate Experiment. I thought it would be fun to make a playlist at the end of the year. Even though it isn’t documented on the page, I plan to use Dancing Queen by ABBA.
Love & Other Words by Christina Lauren
With Love & Other Words, I started to develop some consistency. For each book spread. I want to include a synopsis, statistics, a review, and likes/dislikes. I feel like these mini-reviews and lists help me when writing longer reviews for my blog. With this spread, I decided to start including a song with the book. This song, like many others this month, is by Taylor Swift. My goal in February is to include more artists for my end-of-the-year playlist.
Ship Wrecked by Olivia Dade
Ship Wrecked was one of my easier to spreads to complete. After finishing the first two layouts, I had a pretty good idea of the pattern I wanted to follow with Ship Wrecked. I also liked how the cover of Ship Wrecked brought in a different color palette than my previous two designs.
The Stolen Heir by Holly Black
The Stolen Heir is probably one of my favorite spreads of the month. On this page, I started to experiment with more textures and different layouts. I also liked how this page had a different color scheme than many of my other spreads, which tend to be more colorful. For this page, it was hard to narrow down which quotes I wanted to use since Holly Black often has several stand-out quotes in her works.
Lore Olympus, Volume One by Rachel Smythe
My Lore Olympus spread is definitely my favorite for January. Like with The Stolen Heir, I started to experiment with a different layout and including more embellishments. I liked adding a flower theme because I thought it was a nice nod to Persephone, the main protagonist of the series.
Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
Every Summer After was one of the hardest layouts for me to make this month! I had to keep moving around different parts of the layout until I came up with one that I liked. I was very excited to find pierogi clip art on Etsy to reference the restaurant in the book.
How do you document your reading progress?
Beauty and the Bean Boots 