2024 Reading Journal Setup - My First One! Easy Spreads and Trackers

hi it's marielen welcome back to my channel and welcome to my first reading Journal setup video I am really nervous about this you guys because this is the first reading Journal I've ever had and I haven't made that many bullet Journal spreads in my life so this was scary for me I was going to use a happy planner bullet Journal but I decided instead to use this Archer and Olive Journal that came in one of the subscription boxes last year it looks just like a book I think it's perfect for this theme so let's start with my name page and just chat a little bit first of all can we talk about how I am attempting to be this aesthetic girly with my little plant and candle I got to tell you you guys if you're new to my channel this is not me but I just wanted it to be cozy and nice for a reading Journal video books have always been a big part of my life and last year I made a reading tracker for my planner and I really enjoyed it and I found that I read more last year than I have pretty much any other year since I was a child so it really made a difference and I decided I am going to bite the bullet and make a whole reading journal and let me tell you this took so much time but it was worth it so I watched a whole lot of reading journals setup videos on YouTube there are some great ones out there I will say that this reading Journal is not going to be as aesthetically beautiful as the ones that I see online I did my best but it's definitely different than what you're probably used to seeing my intention when I started was to have a lot of black elements in here combined with pastels but as I went on I realized I needed a little more than that so I decided that 2024 would be florals instead of drawing everything I decided to use stickers I'm taking stickers from Happy planner Mega sticker book garden flowers and honestly I wanted to have sort of the same color theme throughout but it turns out in the end that it really shifts as you go from page to page which I don't really love and that's something I've learned that I want a more consistent theme throughout the journal in fact I've learned a lot of lessons through this process and next year I think we'll go much more smoothly so the first page I'm working on here is my bookshelf I've seen a lot of people set up these cute little bookshelves and I wanted to make make my own there's another part to it on the next page this is just the first section I read 54 books last year so I set a goal this year of 75 books each one of the doodle books represents my book that I'm going to read in real life I'm going to color each one in as I read it and I'll talk about that in a minute I was going to color in this bookshelf brown or leave it white but as I was drawing it I kind of messed up and made things overlap that shouldn't have overlapped so I ended up coloring it all in black which I don't really love but you know it was okay I could have used a ruler to make sure that the lines were perfectly straight but honestly I wanted a Doodle look and then I regretted that because the lines are definitely not as straight as I'd like now it's time to draw the books and that was my favorite part I had a lot of fun sketching this out I literally did it while I was watching TV and tracing it is so much easier than doing you know the first part this is also the page where I wrote out my reading goals for the year so like I said before I'd like to read 75 books I'd also like to read some new genres I have pretty much stuck to romance and Thriller for a very very long time and with some like regular fiction thrown in there but I would really like to Branch out a little bit maybe read some historical fiction read uh I don't know sci-fi fantasy just try different things maybe I will surprise myself and another goal I have is to be consistent with this journal because I tend to set things up sometimes and then neglect them so I'm going to really try and I'd like to join a book club I have to find one in my area I could start one but honestly I would rather meet some new people and just join a a pre-existing Club so that's on my list for January my aesthetic has left the building honestly I don't know how people can stand to have plants and candles and things in the way when they're trying to create so I shoved it all out of the way and let's keep going and yeah this is the real me messy desk and all I didn't need the bottom shelf so on that shelf I made a little key for coloring in the books I'm going to color them in according to whether they're a Kindle book a regular book or an audio book I still have to decide side on the colors so I didn't fill that part in yet but I decided to color in the Doodles that were on the shelves also somehow I lost the footage where I put a flower sticker in the corner and then I wrote how did you do and I put the stripes there I don't know where that footage went but I thought it would be nice to be able to journal underneath my goals at the end of the year the next page is my favorite author's page so I always love to read the same authors over and over again if I love their books and I kind of lose track of you know which books I'd like to read how many more I have to go I do use good reads but it's not really userfriendly for you know keeping track of that sort of thing so I think this will be really good I've always wanted to have a way to track them and I think this will work so underneath each author I'm just going to have little check boxes with all of the books that they've written I know some people who do this just put the ones that they haven't read yet on there but I wanted to keep track of how many I've actually read from each author so I split it in two and I'm just going to go down the page and put a new section in maybe leave a little bit of room when they put out new books so I started with Emily Henry and Taylor Jenkins Reed because they're two of my favorites in the on the bottom I am decorating it with the same flowers that were on the other page and I love this look I realize that I need more space though so I'm going to do two blank pages after that I ended up decorating the blank pages later and you'll see that at the end but right now I'm making my book Bingo page I've seen a lot of creators make these Bingo pages and I thought it just sounded so much fun so I kind of scoured the internet for ideas I only made up a couple of these ideas myself the rest I just copied um and I don't know that I will complete this sheet but it's a fun challenge for me and um hopefully it will just spark my interest in Reading even more I chose different colors of flower stickers for this page and I kind of wish I hadn't because they're so different from the rest that it makes me not like this page as much but they're still pretty on their own I think next year I will definitely make sure that the colors are the same for every page the next page is just an a toz challenge and I took out x and z because I thought they were too hard basically every time I read a book that starts with that letter I can fill it in and we'll see how many I get at the end of the year I thought it sounded like fun I thought I'd make the pages a little cuter by adding a couple of stripes in marker and then putting hearts over them this next page I'm calling TBR and anticipated releases so if you're new to book language TBR just means to be read I have a lot of books on my Goodreads TBR there's probably about 300 books on there I just add to it when I see one that I want to read the problem is there's so many on there that when I go to read one I don't know which one to pick and there's a lot of really good ones that are toward the bottom that I never read I've always wanted a place to keep that list of the ones I wanted to read the most and I'm going to go through my good reads list and sort of pick out those books and put them on this page a lot of people have separate pages for anticipated releases from authors that they love but I decided to put it on this page as well because if it's an anticipated release then for me it's also going on my TBR so I know that combining it might not make sense but to me it makes sense so there's just a place for title and author and then if it is a new release then I will put a little note about the date but other than that title author when I was cutting the edges of the flowers off the bottom of the page I found it so difficult to do it in a bullet Journal because I can't rip the page out of the book I had a really hard time with that has anybody else had that problem I don't know it it was really challenging this next page is a space where I will write my top 10 books of the year the following page is actually a book bracket to figure out my favorite book of the year and I do list my favorites each month but I might really love two or more books in a month more than the following month does that make sense so I decided that I was going to pick my top 10 for the whole year and this is where I will record my top 10 and I'm just going to write them in I'm not going to put the book pictures in here I feel like I'm really inconsistent with my book ratings on Goodreads I keep rating them fours and fives and I feel like I need to switch it up so that I'm rating them properly so I'm going to put my rating system down here and describe how to rate each book just to keep me on track with that and I'll fill this out in a minute I have to think about it this is the book bracket I was telling you about that will help me choose which one was my favorite book for the year because if you're just looking at 75 books that you've read and trying to choose it's really difficult so this helps narrow it down each block on the left and on the right represents a different month and then I choose my favorite book for the month and then from let's say January and February I look at those two books and decide which one it do I like the best and then I put it in the next block and so on and hopefully it will help me figure it out and at the end of the year I will know which one it is and then I'll put it at the top of the page that will be the book of the year I think that's a really cool idea of course I didn't make make this up I saw a whole bunch of people doing this online and after I choose my book of the year I'm going to fill out this next page which is obviously called book of the Year I'll put a photo of the book in there and write my thoughts on it rate it you know maybe put some quotes in there from the book that kind of thing I don't really want to set up this page yet until I have my book of the year and I can sort of figure out how I want to to make this page come to life the next page is my yearly stats page I think it's really interesting to keep statistics about your life and about the books you read so I have total books read total Pages read most most readed month least red month average rating number of new Authors I read and number of books I did not finish but before I write all that in I want to decorate this page so I grabbed some big flowers from one of the happy planner sticker books and put them in here again it's kind of bothering me that all of these flowers are not within the same color palette but I was running out of ideas and um running out of stickers that matched each other still cute by the way this black pen I'm using is a pyma micron size one I've used it for a lot of the pen in this journal also the smaller writing I've been using a Muji 38 pen and also I've been using Tombo dual brush pens for the colored pen in this most of it I'll try to link everything for you in the description box the bottom of this page is a place where I will record the number of books in each genre that I read for the year I think that's going to be some interesting facts for me just to see if I've gotten out of my comfort zone you know what types of books I seem to like out of my comfort zone and all of that so I want a place to record it it also might encourage me to actually do do you know read those types of books so that I have something to put in this little box one of the most frustrating things about setting up this journal was trying to figure out how to track each book that I read I wanted a place where I could put the pictures of the book jackets in there and do like a a star rating but I also was trying to figure out do I want to write a little blurb about each book I really did want to do that but I know myself very well and I also know I probably wouldn't do it I would probably be frustrated with myself for not completing it so I think since this is my first reading Journal ever I'm going to start simple and that means printing out pictures of each book and just doing the star rating underneath so then I thought well should I just do a whole you know bunch of pages of just just the books but I've seen a lot of people making reading journals where they're doing it month by month and they're writing their stats each month and stuff so uh I I didn't know I I was really confused by this so what I ended up deciding to do was a a page for each month and then I set up little um part oh my gosh I can't speak I set up sections where I could put the pictures of the books and then at the bottom a little rectangle where I could write about my favorite book of the month that way I can still write about a book but I'm not forced to write about every single book I bought these star rating stickers from Amazon the shop is called orange umbrella company and um there's a lot of them and they seem to be the right size so I'm putting them under the space for each book picture and this is when I quickly figured out that I should have left myself more room um between the books so then what I did was went back on Google Docs resized the book picture and then March March and up are going to be smaller books I hate that it's not uniform I can't stand that January and February are going to look different from the rest of the months but I thought it would be too frustrating otherwise so I think this is going to be a better solution and again I'm going to know more for next year the other thing I want to mention is that I know I probably will not read seven books each month in fact I know I'm not going to read seven books each month but I wanted to give myself enough room so that if I had seven books in a month I could put them in if I happen to have more than seven books in a month which is highly doubtful but it could happen I'll just figure out how to fit it in at that point um I just wanted it to look aesthetically pleasing another thing to mention too is that I started doing each of the the little guides where I was going to put the pictures I did them in pen and I quickly realized that I want to make sure I go behind where the picture is going to go because I don't want those pen marks to show and then as I went on through the months I figured out that I really just wanted to put the marks in pencil I did not need to put them in pen so that if the marks do go outside the lines I can just erase them and if I have less than seven books in a month I can erase those marks and use it um for stickers or use it for describing more books or a big book quote or something that way the page won't look blank at the end of the year if that makes sense so again it was something I was learning as I was going along and by the the time I hit I don't know like the middle of the year I did it all the right way for March and April I decided not to put all of the star rating stickers in because I didn't want to waste them in case I wasn't reading those books so it's pretty much guaranteed I'm going to read three books in a month so I put in three for March and April and then the rest of the year I'm just going to wait and put them in you know when I get to it I'll keep the stickers in the pocket in the back of my journal just so I can access them when I need and then in each box at the bottom of the page I'm writing favorite book for that month after I finished setting up the journal I thought I would go back through it take a look and add in any details that I might want to add in and what I figured out on this bookshelf is that I don't want to color the whole entire book I think it's going to look better if a lot of the book is white and then I'm just going to color in the stripe on the book or the little circle or the rectangle or whatever so I'm going back in and putting in little details on every book you know because some of them were just completely plain and that way I can make sure I only color in those details I did also choose the colors I was going to use and I put them in my little key this took such a long time but it's finally finished I'm so excited that it's done and um I'm really excited to fill it out this year so let's take a look at everything I have to write my name in there so we have the title page I'm upset that I got I think my my hand like leaned on it with some ink so if you have any suggestions on how to get that off let me know I actually tried to erase it it didn't come off but that's all right so title page here are my 2024 reading goals and my little bookshelf and the rest of the Shelf favorite authors I cannot wait to fill this up because I've wanted a way to track my favorite authors and their books for such a long time and I have a lot of them so I hope this is going to be enough um if not I can add pages in the back or just wait until 2025 to add in more here's my book Bingo my a toz challenge actually I can write in the first one already there we go and my TBR and anticipated releases I considered putting Stripes here for the writing but I decided against it then we have my top 10 and my rating system book of the Year bracket and then a page for the book of the Year 2024 stats I'm disappointed with this page but it's still fun and then here are my monthly pages I'm pretty bummed that I changed partway through and that they're not all the same but live and learn and you know once I turn the page to March I'll be fine but we have all of these I like how they look at the end yeah and that is it I hope you enjoyed this video let me know in the comments do you have a reading Journal have you had success in filling it out I hope that I stick to it think that I will because I put so much work into it and next year when I do this again it is going to be so much easier because I know what to expect and I'll be using it all year because it's hard to set up a reading Journal when you've never used one and you don't exactly know what you need but you know through trial and error I'll find out everything that I like and don't like about this year's journal and then I can just change it next year but I'm going to have fun with it if you're still here thanks so much for watching I appreciate it and I will see you in my next video bye

Channel: Planning with Bumble

Views: 14,851

Keywords: plan with me, creative planning, plan with me 2024, bullet journal, journal with me, reading journal, books, journaling, creative journal, book journal, reading journal setup, reading journal flip through, 2024 reading journal, how to make a reading journal, how to track reading, reading tracker, bujo, notebooks, stationery, journal, goodreads, reading journal trackers, reading journal page ideas, ideas, using stickers in a journal, stickers, lettering

Id: -zLV4_ESPlU

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024