2024 Reading Journal Setup 💜

a new year means a new reading journal or if you're me and you've barely filled the reading Journal that you have it means a new setup in the same Journal today we're going to be setting up my reading journal for 2024 and as I have nowhere near filled my current one we're just going to be keeping on in the same notebook this one is an A5 journal from Archer and Olive and on the inside cover I decided to put in a fantasy map this one isn't a real place it's just make believe and it's filled with a bunch of reading tropes and fun little quirky bits and pieces it was so much fun to set up but it did take me a hot minute so I've got it available as a printable which is linked in the description box but flipping on forward to the first page you can see we already have some paper stuck in here sadly my camera cut off when I accidentally hit the Escape key who would have thought that pressing escape just quits out of your filming without saving anything but really it's just a piece of scrapbooking paper that I stuck into the journal and then tore along that right hand Edge to make it look kind of organic when it comes to my reading Journal I very much like to be kind of scrapbook and use a lot of beiges pinks Browns this isn't a palette that I'm typically drawn to in my regular Journal setups but when it comes to my reading journal in particular this is where I like to use all of those kind of vintagey elements it's not a type of creativity that I am super familiar with or very good at so in terms of the actual time it took to set up all of these layouts I was filming for about 4 hours and after cutting out all of my uming and arring and just sitting there staring at the page being like where do I put things the actual putting things onto the page time only took about 2 hours I say only for a lot of people that's probably still a lot of time but as said this is my creativity time this is one of my leisure activities it's something fun that I like to do so I don't mind taking the time to set them up a lot of the time would probably be cut down if I used more stickers and washi tape rather than pieces of paper because in using papers you have all of the time needed to attach the adhesive to the back of the papers but I like the layering and I also kind of like it when things don't stick down perfectly like I still need them to be stuck in enough that they're not going to really pull up at the corners but it does add a little bit of a 3D texture to it when you have all of the layering though it also adds a lot of bulk to the journal which you would have seen at the start with that kind of side angle this journal isn't even half full yet and it is so chunky but anyway on this page we're setting up my 2024 reading goals now I use the term goals lightly here because I'm not really going to be actively working towards them for most of the year but they're kind of like hopes or things that I would like to achieve through my reading I don't write them down on this page during the setup but it's going to have things like completing my good reads reading challenge doing a 24 in 2024 for my reading so 24 books read I'm not going to preset what those 24 reads are I just want to read 24 books and considering in 2023 I read 25 I think that's a pretty safe goal it was only about halfway through the year that I really started to get into reading so hopefully I should be able to accomplish that one other little reading goals might be things like doing a reader thought on or reading something from a genre that I'm not as familiar with I haven't fully set out what those little goals are going to be so I don't actually write them in but where they're going to end up is on that piece of paper that we're sticking into the middle this one is also from Aran Olive it came in their subscription box from September 2023 and it's effectively laid out to look like those library cards that you have in the front of books that you could stamp on and say when people had checked out the book I don't know if they still use those anymore it's been many moons since I went and actually borrowed a book from a library but I did think that the general aesthetic of it was pretty nice and matches well with the reading Journal something that a lot of people do in their reading journals that I was kind of apprehensive to do when I first started mine was a bookshelf layout or a bookshelf Fe I like the term of that I think it's kind of cute so for my 24 reads in 2024 challenge I thought I would put those on the bookshelf I know some people do like a full double page spread with like a hundred books on their bookshelves I am not that kind of reader I am much slower so having 24 books on the Shelf seems like a much more approachable number to me in previous iterations of trying to do a book shelfy layout I have sometimes opted to draw the books in as I read things but this one I thought I would sketch in in advance all at once at least then my line work will look similar throughout the whole thing typically when I've done bookshelf layouts previously I opt to use a ruler to put the books and the bookshelf in cuz I quite like straight lines but I don't know why it kind of felt a little bit silly to put super straight lines with a kind of or ganic feel that we've got going with the rest of the layout so I just opted to sketch this in with a micron pen despite the fact that this is time-elapsed and it does look like it's going quite fast I did take my time with this because didn't want my lines to go completely catty Wampus but I was okay if they were a little bit skew wiff not majorly just a little bit but I think that the handrawn effect without the super super straight lines just kind of matches the vibe a little bit better at this stage I'm not too sure if I'm going to write the book titles on the books or if I'm just going to color the books in and I'm also not sure if I'm going to color code the books maybe in terms of like their rating or how I read them though if it's how I read them it would be a pretty boring tracker cuz I pretty much exclusively do ebooks but it's fine and I have seen it where some people color in the spine edge of the book that's on the little bookshelf tracker so that it actually looks like the book spine of the actual book while I think that is a super cool idea I probably won't be doing it mainly because then I'm going to end up reading books where the color doesn't really match the color palette I'm going with here and I know that's a very prissy thing of me to say but I am a little bit Prissy so it's fine to color in the bookshelf though I just used a Tombo duel brush marker and as I was going through this one I made sure to kind of double up on some of my lines so that then the bookshelf had a little bit of texture to it I was tempted to color in the back of the bookshelf so the SPAC is in between the books but I know that if I had have started doing that I would have not liked it so I avoided it despite my kind of internal monologue saying J color in color on the Shelf you have to color in the back of the Shelf oh my gosh what are you doing but no don't color it in if you're ever wondering about whether a doodle needs some coloring in or if you want to color in a particular section one of the things that you can do before you go and commit to it in your Journal is just take a photoc copy or a scan of your notebook page and then try and color it in on a print out rather than actually in your Journal so you can see if you like it before you commit to it I know from prior experience that I would not like it if it was colored in so I just chose not to even though I kind of wanted to and just got on with decorating the rest of the page now in terms of all of the little vintage elements that we're using in this setup all of them are from a bunch of different places the grid tape in particular is from the washi tape shop the little stickers that come on the Washi roll those are from the washi tape shop we've got a bunch of things from Journal say and things from stationary pal I've tried to link the majority of what I can in the description box and there's also a bunch of discount codes down there so if you want to grab yourself some savings make sure that you apply those at check check out too we love savings this spread effectively acts as my cover page or kind of intro page for 2024 though and now as it's done we can flip on over and get into the space that I'm going to be recording my reads as said this journal isn't a fresh one for the new year it is one that I have already started using and in those previous pages that I've already set up I do have places to record my reads there in particular my running books Red List which actually goes across two spreads so I will already be recording my reads over there but I wanted this page in particular just to capture my 2024 reads while it does seem a little bit redundant to double up on that information and I am also the kind of person who doesn't really like redundancy or doubling up so you may be questioning Jess what are you doing but I've specifically decided to put it here so that it can work with the layout I'm going to have on the right hand page we'll talk more about that one in a bit but effectively that's going to be how I'm deciding my top reads of the year but the structure of the layout we're working on at the moment is pretty simple it's just a list of what the books I've read are and I'm highlighting every second line with my Tombo dual brush marker just so that it stands out a little bit I also like how this kind of softens the white of the page because the majority of the decoration is in kind of like Tans and Browns and those warmer colors having a stark white page kind of feels a little bit too Punchy so highlighting every second line just kind of calms it down in terms of recording the reads though I have a space to write out the date that I finished the read what the title of the read was and also a space to indicate my rating that's going to be important when it comes to actually picking my top reads of the year and then that top banner I just put some decoration in using more of those vintagey scrap bookie kind of elements for all of the titles in the layout though I have used these little kind of tickets those ones in particular were from stationary pal and they come in a pink a tan and a kind of cream color so I've just alternated them between each of the layouts and I'm using a simple script lettering that I've come to use quite a lot in my journal setups it is certainly not my regular handwriting my regular handwriting doesn't look like like pretty much anything we have in this video but it is a lettering style that I've kind of been practicing by using it more in my journal and thus have been getting a lot better at doing it quickly now as we're on to the page on the right this is what I'm calling my head-to-head layout and this one is set up as effectively a prioritization matrix so going diagonally down the page we have letters a through J and they're going to be used to represent different books that I've read across the year in particular my 10 contenders for best book of the Year underneath that diagonal set section we then have those circles again where I'll label them a through J and underneath those is where I'm going to tally up or count how many times they appear on The prioritization Matrix we do have a separate video where we talk a little bit more about how the prioritization Matrix works but effectively rather than considering your whole lineup of 10 books and trying to rank definitively what order they are in in terms of like best to least best you consider them instead on a onetoone basis or head-to-head so once I've decided which letter represents which book I can then go and consider them against each other so book a versus book b which one was better which one wins on that dot that's just under a and to the left of B that's where I can specify which book was better which one wins so let's just say it was B and I write B down I can then go and do that head-to-head battle for each of the books so considering a versus C B versus C A versus D B versus D Etc and once I've done each of those head tohe head I then just have to count how many times each letter appeared in that triangle of dots whichever one appeared the most is the best book whichever one appeared the second most is the second best book so on and so forth the section at the bottom is where I'm going to list out that definitive ranking so I've listed it from 1 to 10 where 1 will be the best book of the year and 10 will be the 10th best book of the year of course I do plan on reading more than 10 books and that's why I wanted that 2024 reads kind of summary on the left hand side I want to be able to use use that and the ratings that I've got there to pick out those 10 books to start with rather than considering all 24 or potentially more raids which would be probably just a little bit overwhelming considering how much you already have to do if you're just considering 10 books but I'm eag going to see how this one goes I really love the idea of the prioritization Matrix this is something that you can also use for tasks as well so if you have 10 things on your task list and you're like oh my gosh where do I start I'm so overwhelmed then rather than trying to consider all 10 of them at once you put them in this head-to-head battle and say like okay of these two tasks which one is more important of these two tasks which one is more important go through the process get your numbers out at the end and rank them accordingly in terms of having a space to actually record what book represents which letter before I actually go and fill in The Matrix those ones are going to go in the space that I'm putting that every second line highlighted underneath the title and to the right hand side of the prioritization Matrix triangle this layout isn't going to be one that I really use throughout the year it's more so going to be an endof year layout but I know that future Jess is going to appreciate that we set it up ahead of time one of the things I really love my reading journal for is kind of like gamifying my reading this gamification process has brought a lot of enjoyment to my reading so on the next spread we're going to be putting in a reading Bingo or a book Bingo to decorate this layout I'm going to cover the entire spread with scrapbooking paper and this one in particular has little Bingo boards on it already so I thought that was kind of a cute tie in but rather than just going in and sticking it in it is I really wanted to fold the ever loving heck out of that piece of paper because the scrapbooking paper is fairly thick and if we make a groove or a nice defined fold in the middle of it it's just going to be one easier to actually stick down on the page and two it means that the page is going to operate a lot more nicely when we go to actually use the journal if you stick the paper down without folding it there is a good chance that it's not really going to align well with the page and also then when you go to close the notebook you have to work against the unfolded paper which just isn't Fun you'll have seen that to make that fold nice and defined I used my ruler and the back of my fingernail and all of this to really really crease it down you can use other tools for those kind of things I just don't have any though previously I have used my Cricut scraper that one works pretty well too to actually Stick it to the page though I used double-sided tape and I used a combination of double-sided tape on the paper directly and on the notebook directly the pieces that I put on The Notebook are the ones that go around the very edge of the notebook page mainly so that could get that really really close to the edge of the page rather than trying to kind of have to guess on the scrapbooking paper where the edge of the page would end up versus the edge of the scrapbooking paper that would have just been a little bit too difficult so putting that one into the notebook directly but then when it comes to the crease or the fold of the spread those pieces of tape I put on the scrapbooking paper you don't have to do it this way I just find it's the easiest way to do it and it means that I get good adhesion over the entire page once the scrapbooking paper was in though it was time to actually build in our other element elements so things like the title which is just on those little tickets again couple little decorative elements here and there but then also the Bingo boards themselves I just made these in Microsoft Word just kind of typed them up and printed them out and you can see that I didn't just print out two Bingo boards with text on them I also printed out two empty Bingo boards now these aren't Bingo boards that I'm going to fill in prompts with these are going to be the places that I put the books that I read as related to those prompts I found that in 2023 for my bingo board this year I didn't really think ahead of time how I was going to record which read went with which prompt mainly because honestly I didn't think I was going to want to do that but then I started forgetting which prompt had associated with which book especially because I only wanted to use each book once on each of the Bingo boards to save myself some heartache of having to figure out a way to record those reads and which one went with which prompt I decided to do a stacked method where we have two Bingo boards laying one on top of the other the top Bingo board being the one with the prompt and then I can flip that Bingo board up and underneath This Record what the book actually was this one did require a little bit of creative sticking so cutting the blank bingo board to size and then cutting the text filled Bingo board so it had a little bit of extra page at the top that I could fold under the other Bingo board and stick underneath it it's a little bit hard to explain hopefully it kind of makes sense but effectively I wanted that top Bingo board to flip up so I needed to have a little fold under that it could flip up from yeah actually get those down onto the page was a little bit tricky but I do think that they look quite good now as they're stuck in I also wanted to add a little bit more visual interest to the page just by putting in some little Washi pieces and some little sticker bits whatever else but I think this one is going to be a lot of fun to fill in as the year goes on if you wanted to NAB these Bingo boards for yourself then they are available for free in our resource Library there's a link to that one in the description box if you wanted to check it out flipping over though and our next collection of pages are all related to the Bojo buddies book club this is a book club that's run by me and some of my friends Rachel and Monica where we take it in turns to put forward some potential reads for the month ahead and then our book club members vote on which one we actually read now as said this is a collection of pages it's not just like one standalone book club page but the first one we're putting in is a place for the book club rules the rules do have a tendency to change from year to year even if only slightly so I wanted to have a place to outline the rules for next year despite already having a page in the journal with the rules from this year if you wanted to get involved with the book club one we would love to have you so please do and two we do have an introductory video which talks about how it works how you can get involved that one fnally enough is also linked in the description box if you wanted to shortcut the process though you can just come and join our Discord that is where the magic happens and even if you don't really want to get involved in the book club the Discord is free for anybody to join in terms of the layout itself though I wanted to keep this kind of similar to what I did for 2023 so with some side panel decoration and the little title at the top I ended up playing placing down the space where I'm going to be writing the rules in slightly differently to last year though so when it came to decorating the page I did have a little bit of a hard time as said before scrapbook kind of things aren't really my forte I'm not super great at them and it does take me a little bit of time to figure out where I want to place Elements which if you're working with papers it can be a little bit nicer cuz you can kind of lay them down and map them out so you can see how things are going to work together but when you're using washi tape it's a little bit hard to do that without just sticking it to the page I did eventually get it in a way that I was fairly happy with though and I didn't want to add too much decoration to this one because on the other page on the right hand side that layout is going to end up looking quite full once I start using it the right hand page is where I'm going to be putting the book covers of all of our different reads for the year and because these are going to be printed out as little books that layout is going to end up looking fairly busy I'm actually not too sad about that I kind of don't really like whites space in general I like to think of my reading Journal as my busy book it's the journal where all of the pages are really full and kind of like almost cluttered but in a semi- nice way though I will say some of these layouts I feel like ended up looking a little more cluttered than I meant to but it's fine kind of goes with the whole territory of this is not my forte and this is a creative space rather than drawing out where each of the book covers are going to go though I just opted to cover the entire page with scrapbooking paper that was fairly neutral and then as we read the different books I can just go and print off and cut out those little covers and stick them into the notebook I'm not too sure at this stage what sizing I'm going to use because I want to fit the entire year of books on this one page and I am using an A5 notebook for this so they're probably going to have to be on the smaller side on to the next spread and we have some more book club related layouts the first one here on the left though is going to be a place to write out all of the potential reads for the year so while the last page was effectively the winners of each month's poll this one is going to house all of the different options we had for those polls on the tan lines that I'm putting in this is where I'm going to specify what month it was who picked the options and what kind of read theme they were going with we like to pick our books with a slight restriction so for instance maybe it's fantasy reading month or sci-fi or a mood read or a TBR veteran whatever it is so I wanted to be able to record that on those brown lines and then on the two lines that follow I'm going to be recording each of the two options that we had for that read theme so effectively we'll have the winner and the runner up because this took up the majority of the page I didn't really have space to put in one of those little ticket headers so I opted to just write the head-to head on the page itself but I will say that the layout that I have like this for this year looks so super satisfying now that it's all filled in I did structure it a little bit differently this year but I kind of like this one better because then you can see the read theme right next to the books that were picked for it whereas in 2023 I had them separate that one got a couple of stickers for decoration but onto the right hand side this is where we're going to be planning out the goober readathon every so often Rachel and I like to do reading days or kind of like you know just book aons getting together for like 12 hours and just sitting down and reading having some snacks it's a very good time and at our last one we invited moniker along and now as moniker is also a leader of the book club we thought it would be kind of nice to have a book club dedicated readathon we are still very much in the planning stages of that we haven't actually formalized anything except for the fact that it's going to be called the goober readathon because we're all goobers but I wanted a place to plan that out in this journal and it'll probably end up being kind of like a memory keeping page for the planning and execution of the readathon if you want to get involved with the readathon we're probably going to end up announcing it on YouTube so make sure that you're subscribed to the channel if you don't want to miss out as we don't have a lot of formal details for that one though this page is left pretty empty so just a bunch of space where I can plan out all of the details and then the header where I've just got a little bit of decoration again having utilized that scrapbooking paper to make some very nice coverage up the top now another thing that I super love from other people's reading journals are their reading stats especially they kind of like midyear and end of year reading wrap-ups and the little graphs that they put in and the little trackers and tables and whatever I think it's all very cute and while I kind of in my mind don't think I realistically read enough to do a quarterly check-in I'm still going to try and make one for next year because I'm not too sure at this stage what stats I actually want to track and what I want to keep track of or record I'm keeping this one fairly open so just putting the title for the page in the Middle with like you know quarterly reading stats with a little bit of paper for background decoration and then splitting the page into four quadrants so top left bottom left top right and bottom right each of those spaces is going to hold each of the quarters I'm not too sure at this stage if I want to do well quarter one is going to go in the top left that seems very normal to me but then I'm not sure if I want to put Quarter Two underneath that or at the top of the right hand page which one would you go with would you be more more inclined to put quarter two on the bottom of the left or the top of the right I'm conflicted but as said because I'm not too sure at this stage what I want to record I'm leaving the spaces fairly open and just putting in a little bit of corner decoration with some washi tape this washi tape is in the style of an old world map and I quite like it because it makes for a very good neutral background like obviously it fits into the color palette we're working with but it doesn't have anything on it that so super stands out that really draws your eye to it or at least I think it doesn't along with the qu stats though I also wanted to have a place for a 2024 in review now typically speaking people would usually set this up after they've done things like their monthly reading Pages or quarterly check-ins or any kind of little book ratings and reviews and such initially when I was setting up my reading Journal I was very much of the mind that I was not going to do any kind of reading review in this notebook mainly because I don't really like writing reviews even on good reads and that's typing and that's way faster and often times I get to to the end of the book and if I don't have somebody to discuss it with I just go yep that was good move on to another one after having a flip through of Monica's Journal though which we also have a video of I was very much in Camp fomo when it came to reading reviews I just thought it was really nice to have like the little summary of each of the books and your thoughts about them I liked the consistency of how she'd set up all the pages so they each got a half page even for the books she really loved and the way she'd done it made it just seem so easy so I did towards the end of this year decide I was going to go back and do little reviews for every single book I read this year thankfully I don't read all that much well I do now read a lot more than I used to but compared to the likes of Monica I don't read as much so I went in and I printed out all of the little covers for all of the little books and wrote some little reviews for all of them and I loved it but I had already put in my 2023 in review page before those reviews to kind of keep it consistent throughout this journal I decided to do the same for 2024 so putting in this yearly review page before any of those individual book reviews you may have seen me turn over the page a little earlier and there are actually some other layouts that I want to put in before those but they're not specifically related to my 2024 setup so we're not going to look at those today if you would like to see how those pages turn out though and want me to make a video of it make sure to cast your vote by liking this video liking a video effectively tells me hey Jess I want to see more of that more please having a look at the layouts we set up in this one though I super love how these turned out as said the scrapbooking style isn't really my usual and I'm not as good at it as other people but this is just really good for some creative fun and that's what I want my reading journal to be I'm looking forward to my reading challenges including the Bingo and the book club and my 24 and 2024 I need to have a little bit more of a think about how I want to do the goober readathon and what reading stats I want to record but I am very much looking forward to using these layouts if you wanted more ideas for your reading Journal then we do have the playlist on screen here which has all of our reading Journal videos that includes previous flip throughs for instance Monica's Journal previous setups for instance my reading journal and a bunch of other things that can help you out for your reading journal in particular that one's worth checking out so click or tap on that one and I'll see you over there

Channel: JashiiCorrin

Views: 73,433

Keywords: reading journal, reading notebook, reading bullet journal, bullet journal for reading, bullet journaling for readers, bullet journal for readers, reading journal setup, reading journal set up, reading journal ideas, reading journal for beginners, beginners reading journal, reading bujo, reading journal layouts, reading journal layout, reading journal flip through, reading journal setup 2024, 2024 reading journal setup, 2024 reading bullet journal

Id: 0F4DfQTHyTs

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2023