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Oops, I haven't updated since the beginning of the month. I guess nothing particularly exciting has been going on. Work continues as normal, weekends I've been vegging out at home. Not much journal-worthy haha. I've got a couple posts I've been meaning to make (some fandom stuff, some movie talk, etc.) but I need to sort out what I want to write.
The last couple weekends I've been working on my 2024 Reading Journal and I'm finally done! I've never made a physical reading journal before, but last year I got this cute notepad from a local artist and once it was filled I decided I wanted to paste the pages into a single notebook to keep it all contained rather than save a flimsy notepad. Then I decorated a few basic spreads at the beginning and voila, reading journal!
The notebook I used was the top one in this pic because it kind of matched the decorations on the notepad pages, so I went with a space theme for the rest of the decorations!

My cursive is horrible and my inking is even worse, so that wasn't great, but otherwise this was a really cute sticker sheet I had from some random miscellany of stickers I bought, so that became the deco for the title page.

The next page I collaged a bunch of random space-themed memo sheets and stickers! The only thing I think I would have changed is putting that top gold sticker a little higher up so it's not overlapping the bunny moon sticker, but whatever. And then the very simple index page that pissed me off because I didn't think about truncating those two really long book titles until AFTER I'd written everything in. So now it's just annoyingly uneven up top sjdhfksjfs



This spread is like, fancy YouTube journaler 101, but I'm so proud of it lmao. I cut the tops off the two pages in the middle to create what is apparently called a Dutch door layout so I could use the same header across the top. Then I was trying to figure out how I wanted to write in the title and realized I had half a moon left from the collage at the beginning, so I cut it in half again and carefully pasted it on other side of the "doors" so I could turn the pages but still have that mostly circular shape. I'm a genius!!!
The covers are a chronological display of everything I read last year, both books and graphic novels. (I track manga elsewhere, so no manga.) Originally I wanted to put the star ratings for everything underneath the covers, but once I started pasting them in I realized it might be too crowded so I think I might just leave it as is.
And then the stats page I just copied some stuff from my Storygraph year in review to fill in the space lol. I'm not very good at visualizing layouts, I don't know how the really crafty journalers do it because I'm just like *sticks everything in wherever and then lives with the consequences*
Also idk why Storygraph thinks LGBT stuff and graphic novels are genres but whatever, I needed to fill space.
The remainder of the notebook is just the individual review sheets pasted on the pages. My friend told me to do a collage for each book on the left-hand side because the backs of the pages are blank, but I feel like that would take way more time and resources than I want to put into this so I'll probably just call this finished and never look at it again.
This year I'm not planning on doing a specific reading journal, but I do want to do a general media journal! So books plus anime, movies, games, etc. I still have to determine how I want to do the layout and then work on backfilling January/February, but I know it's definitely not going to be nearly as fancy as this book.
If anyone keeps a reading journal or something similar, I'd love to see pics! I watch so many videos on YouTube of people setting up their reading journals even though I know I'll never do anything that fancy, they're just so pretty to look at.
The last couple weekends I've been working on my 2024 Reading Journal and I'm finally done! I've never made a physical reading journal before, but last year I got this cute notepad from a local artist and once it was filled I decided I wanted to paste the pages into a single notebook to keep it all contained rather than save a flimsy notepad. Then I decorated a few basic spreads at the beginning and voila, reading journal!

My cursive is horrible and my inking is even worse, so that wasn't great, but otherwise this was a really cute sticker sheet I had from some random miscellany of stickers I bought, so that became the deco for the title page.

The next page I collaged a bunch of random space-themed memo sheets and stickers! The only thing I think I would have changed is putting that top gold sticker a little higher up so it's not overlapping the bunny moon sticker, but whatever. And then the very simple index page that pissed me off because I didn't think about truncating those two really long book titles until AFTER I'd written everything in. So now it's just annoyingly uneven up top sjdhfksjfs



This spread is like, fancy YouTube journaler 101, but I'm so proud of it lmao. I cut the tops off the two pages in the middle to create what is apparently called a Dutch door layout so I could use the same header across the top. Then I was trying to figure out how I wanted to write in the title and realized I had half a moon left from the collage at the beginning, so I cut it in half again and carefully pasted it on other side of the "doors" so I could turn the pages but still have that mostly circular shape. I'm a genius!!!
The covers are a chronological display of everything I read last year, both books and graphic novels. (I track manga elsewhere, so no manga.) Originally I wanted to put the star ratings for everything underneath the covers, but once I started pasting them in I realized it might be too crowded so I think I might just leave it as is.
And then the stats page I just copied some stuff from my Storygraph year in review to fill in the space lol. I'm not very good at visualizing layouts, I don't know how the really crafty journalers do it because I'm just like *sticks everything in wherever and then lives with the consequences*
Also idk why Storygraph thinks LGBT stuff and graphic novels are genres but whatever, I needed to fill space.
The remainder of the notebook is just the individual review sheets pasted on the pages. My friend told me to do a collage for each book on the left-hand side because the backs of the pages are blank, but I feel like that would take way more time and resources than I want to put into this so I'll probably just call this finished and never look at it again.
This year I'm not planning on doing a specific reading journal, but I do want to do a general media journal! So books plus anime, movies, games, etc. I still have to determine how I want to do the layout and then work on backfilling January/February, but I know it's definitely not going to be nearly as fancy as this book.
If anyone keeps a reading journal or something similar, I'd love to see pics! I watch so many videos on YouTube of people setting up their reading journals even though I know I'll never do anything that fancy, they're just so pretty to look at.

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Also, I'm curious to the book that you DNF'd. 🤣🤣
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Honestly I've never made anything like this before, so you could totally try too! I'm not artistic at all so it was a lot of just looking at my stickers/memo sheets and trying to rearrange them lol.
Haha it was the second Heaven Official's Blessing book, I started it at a bad time because it was right before Confounding Oaths/You're the Problem/Swordcrossed all released, so I set it aside to read all those, THEN I re-read the whole Last Binding trilogy to canon review for Yuletide, then I had to read Will of the Many because I promised my friend I would do it before the end of the year. SO I JUST GAVE UP ON IT FOR NOW but I do want to get back to it at some point lmao.