The notebook started as a training exercise, honestly, something my supervisor had me do in my first few months to get comfortable describing a book’s physical details quickly and consistently before I was trusted to do it on real archival material. Title, edition, printing, condition notes, one line each, over and over on donated test items nobody cared about, just to build the muscle. I kept doing it at home almost by accident, the same habit applied to whatever I was actually reading for myself, and six years later I’ve got four notebooks full of one line entries that nobody but me has ever asked to see.

It’s not a reading tracker in the way people mean when they talk about reading trackers online, no star ratings, no yearly goal, no little graph of pages per month. Just the facts a librarian would want: title, author, publisher, printing, and then, if something happened worth remembering, a half sentence at the end. “Reread after five years, opinion changed completely.” “Borrowed from Odette, water damaged on the return, feel terrible about it.” “Read on the porch the entire month of June, best possible way.” I go back through old entries more than I’d have guessed I would, mostly by accident, flipping past a title from three years ago while looking for something else and getting genuinely stopped by whatever four word note I left myself.

What I like about the format, over an app or a spreadsheet, is exactly what I like about the physical books themselves, which is that the notebook itself accumulates its own wear and history alongside the information in it. The oldest one has a coffee ring on the cover from a specific bad morning I can actually still place. The handwriting gets visibly worse in the entries from a stretch two years ago when I was reading fast and tired and didn’t much care about penmanship. An app wouldn’t hold any of that. It would just hold the data, clean and identical every time you opened it, and I think that’s exactly the thing I don’t actually want from a reading log.

I’ve thought about digitizing it, mostly so it’s backed up somewhere in case of fire or flood or the ordinary disaster of just losing a notebook. Haven’t done it. Some tiny part of me suspects that the moment it exists as a spreadsheet is the moment it stops being a thing I actually keep and starts being a thing I maintain, and those feel like different verbs to me even if I can’t fully explain why. For now it stays on paper, on the shelf next to the chair, getting a little more battered every year, exactly the way I’d want a book I actually cared about to look.