Okay, so I’ll be honest. I can’t lie to you guys, but this was not the plan for todays blog. I had planned on finishing my current read and that didn’t happen. I’m sorry. She’s still a work in progress but I’m hoping to finish it up today. I’m going to try to list any of the products that I used when making my journal but I might miss some (because I made this so long ago now). None of the links are affiliate links I just don’t want to gatekeep you from the joy of journaling!
Side note: I decided to try out WordPress AI Caption Generation for the images. Let me know what you think!
The Journal
First, I selected a journal from Archer & Olives Halloween collection. I ended up getting this on a sale as I bought it around Black Friday, but it’s a hardcover dotted journal with two built in bookmarks. My goal was to purchase a nice journal with plenty of pages because I intend to use it for multiple years. This is my first year doing a steady journal so I didn’t make a lot of different pages and I figured that having one journal for multiple years would do me better than one journal for each year. That may change in the future but for now this is what works best for me!
The Spreads
I made a total of 8 spreads for this reading journal and that includes 2 spreads that are not actually used for writing in (the title and the references). I looked online for a few different spreads that I thought would be easy enough for me to work on that wouldn’t overwhelm me. I love crafting so I knew I’d love making the journal, but I am awful at actually committing to writing in a journal. If it asks me to fill in too much, I’m going to stop working on it. That’s just me. In the future, I’d love to expand my journal but for now my goal is to just consistently utilize it throughout the year.
Title and Reference
The first two spreads that you will be greeted with are the title and reference pages. Because I intend to use this journal for multiple years I have the first page left blank so that I can make a table of contents with each year that is in the journal. The second page is the title block for the 2025 year. I went with a sort of academia theme throughout the journal (or at least tried to anyways).
For the Reference page I chose to write down a simple rating guide. This is what I use to guide me when rating books for this blog as well as my journal. I chose to not do any decimal ratings mostly because I couldn’t figure out how I wanted that to be represented in my journal with the color ratings and I made the decision to keep it as simple as possible this time around. I’ve seen many rating guides out there but I wanted something that didn’t make me feel like I was creating a teachers rubric (I’ve got a B.S. in Secondary Education but chose not to teach so I don’t feel like re-living that time of my life.)
I chose to make a DNF a 1 star because, honestly, if a book is bad enough to warrant a 1 star review I’m probably not going to finish it. I don’t want to waste my time with bad books when I have only a bit of time to read in the first place. On the other side, a 5 star review is something I will ardently adore. These are the books that I will read again and again. If I am willing to pick a book back up again, that’s a 5 star.
I also listed for myself 3 goals for the 2025 year:
- Read more Kindle books (or e-books in general)
- Finish more series
- Read 30 books
Goal Tracking Bookshelf
I decided to use the classic bookshelf spread to create my goal tracker. There are 30 books on shelf to represent my goal. I color in each book with the color that represents the rating. So far, I’ve only read 4 star and 5 star books this year (which is fantastic!). For this spread I found a simple bookshelf outline and printed it out, instead of drawing my own. I did draw in the squares for the books but I didn’t trust myself to draw the bookshelf. I’m crafty, not an artist. Most of the stickers are from rolls of PET washi tape from The Washi Tape Store. I used their Macbeth Manuscripts tape (unfortunately this isn’t on their website anymore) and their Cats and Books tape.
Read What You Own (TBR)
I have so many books I haven’t read yet. It’s not my proudest moment but I am trying to read some more. For this spread, I picked 30 books out of my TBR tin and wrote them down for books to read. I haven’t read any of them yet….awkward. In my (tiny) defense, I have been reading from my TBR tin, I just haven’t pulled any that are on this list.
A lot of the stickers here are still from the couple of rolls I mentioned before but I bought the letter stamps from Amazon and they’ve worked really well for me throughout the journal. I don’t even mind the occasional corner of the stamp showing up because it was close to the vibe I was going for anyways. A lot of the products I used for my journal also came from a shop called Stationary Pal. They usually have really good sales and good prices. A lot of my pens and stationary organizers came from this shop. I believe it does ship from China so if that’s something you’re trying to avoid you probably won’t want to purchase from here.
The Series Tracker
For the series tracker I ended up doing this flip page type of things. I know this has a specific name but I honestly have no idea what it is. I decided to do this because I wanted to have a key for the symbols and colors I use in the series tracker but without compromising the space available to list a series. I think this is the spread I did the most research on when trying to find a way to create the spread that I liked both aesthetically and for practical use. I went with this very grid like pattern, but it allows me to keep track of more than just the series. This helped to inspire the digital Series Tracker that I use. I found a series tracker that someone else had created in Google Sheets and modified it to what I wanted utilizing the same symbols to denote if I own the book or if it’s not out yet and the colors that are colored in correlate to the rating that I give the book. It’s a quick and easy way to visualize this data. I’m genuinely happy with how it turned out.
Book Bingo
I used essentially the same technique for my book bingo page just, in a different direction.
I wanted to add a book challenge to the journal so I settled on doing a Book Bingo. Many of these squares are relatively easy to complete because they’re already something that I would read anyways, however, I did put in a few that would be a bit more challenging for me and would require more than just “a lucky pick” to complete. Once again, this is mostly just to try and ease myself into the journaling space. I want to foster this desire to create this sort of product for myself and actually use it. I can always add more to it another year!
I used an old bullet journal of the same size to cut out the actual bingo grid and then glued the top grid and bottom grid together before gluing the entire Bingo to the page. This allowed me to make as many mistakes as I needed before actually adding it to the journal. I put the prompt on the top page and once I complete it, I color it in with the rating of the book that completed the prompt and the write the title of the book in the corresponding square underneath the prompt. I did not create this idea (although I love it) but I did find it from another content creator. I wish I had known when I made this journal that I’d be making content myself and I would have ALL of the links for you guys. I’ll have to do better in the future.
Monthly Stats
If you’ve been reading my monthly wrap-ups (the two I have posted since I started this blog) then you’ll know that I love a good data grid. If you wondered where I keep track of that data – here it is!
The layout for this page I did find from another person who does bullet journaling, however, the stats selected where my own. These were the pieces of data I wanted to track for the year. As you can see, I am failing at my goal of finishing more series. You can also see that I don’t read a lot of books in a month, but that’s fine! I’m happy I have the time to read at all, so I don’t let that bother me too much. I am also trying to keep track of how many books I purchase through the year. I don’t want to continue to purchase a lot of books and never read them but I also want to purchase books to support authors that I really love so it’s a bit of a pickle for me if I’m honest.
The Book Log
Finally! The End! I have the book log! I put this at the end of my journal specifically because I wanted to make sure I had the room if I wanted (or needed) to add more. I kept it simple, only logging very basic stats because while I love data, I also don’t like doing too much work. Remember, the goal this time around was to keep it simple so I continue to utilize the journal.
A detailed book log showing titles, authors, series, pages, finish dates, and ratings for several books.
It took me a while to figure out how to fit in the information that I wanted to use in a small area. This is where it’s great to have a cheaper bullet journal of the same size to practice creating different layouts. I had started the year using a date stamp like what they used to use in libraries on the library card, but I hate the date stamp I currently have because it doesn’t always work. I need a different one. Until then, I’ll write in the dates by hand. I have exactly 30 of these blocks for the goal I’ve set up for myself with plenty of room to add another page or two if needed. Honestly, I’ll be happy to hit 30 books read this year and any book after that is just a lovely bonus!
So that’s it! There’s my book journal. I didn’t leave a ton of specific product links, but if you’d like that I can definitely come back and create a better list for you guys. I am happy with how it came out this year and I have been thinking of what theme I want to use for the 2026 book journal and if I want to change up any of the spreads. If you don’t want to make your own book journal, there are pre-made ones out there that are really nice. I had one from The Quirky Cup Collective that is absolutely stunning but I ended up not using it most of the time, not because it’s bad but just because I didn’t feel like filling it out and I felt awful if I didn’t have something to put in one of the areas. That’s why I chose to make my own.
If you ever feel like you can’t do something like this just know that you definitely can! Mine is 100% wonky in places but I created it for me. You can’t really get any more personalized than that! Let me know about your reading journals and what kind of data you like to track! Also, as always, dad jokes welcomed.
See you next Sunday friends!
Reading with teafortiffany 
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