I keep a paper log of every book I finish, title, date, one line, nothing fancier than that, and every so often someone asks why I don’t just use one of the apps, since apparently there are several good ones now, and I never have a satisfying answer beyond the fact that I spend my actual work week filling out condition reports on other people’s paper, so keeping my own reading life on paper too feels less like a quirk and more like consistency. Anyhoo. The habit started about six years ago, not for any noble reason, I just kept forgetting what I’d read the year before and getting embarrassed about it at exactly the wrong moments, usually when someone at the historical society asked what I was reading and I blanked entirely.
The actual entries are boring in a way I’ve come to like. Most of them are a title, an author, a date, and a single clause, “good, slow start,” “disappointing ending, would still recommend,” that kind of thing. Every once in a while there’s a longer note, and those longer notes are almost always about a book that changed my mind partway through, which is its own small pleasure to flip back and find later. I went back through the log last month looking for something else entirely and found an entry from three years ago that just said, in its entirety, “hated the first third, could not put it down after,” about a book I now recommend constantly. I have no memory of writing that sentence. I trust it completely.
What the log actually does, and this took me a while to notice, is keep me honest about my own taste in a way a five-star rating never could. A five-star system flattens everything into the same five buckets, but a paper log with room for one weird, specific sentence captures the thing that actually mattered about a book, not just how much I liked it. “Made me irrationally angry at page 40, glad I stayed” tells you more about what a book is actually doing than four stars does, and I’d rather have that on record than a number I’ll have forgotten the reasoning behind in a year.
There’s a practical side to this too, the same instinct that makes me want a real, physical inventory at work rather than trusting a database that could get corrupted or migrated badly someday. I don’t fully trust anything I can’t hold, which sounds a little precious for a woman who reviews board games on a website, but it’s true, and it’s the same reason I still buy physical books even though I own an e-reader that’s perfectly serviceable and mostly gathers dust in a drawer.
I don’t expect anyone else to keep a notebook instead of an app, and I’m not going to pretend there’s a deep philosophical case for it beyond the fact that it works for me and it’s satisfying to see the stack of finished notebooks grow on the shelf next to my desk, four of them now, cheap and unglamorous and completely, genuinely mine in a way nothing synced to a server ever quite manages to feel.