Keeping Track

I never kept track of what I read until I signed up for LibraryThing in late summer of 2007. (LibraryThing, for those of you who haven’t discovered it yet, is an organized book person’s dream: something of an online catalog of your own personal library that you can organize and edit as you please!) I quickly found and joined a group called 50 Book Challenge, where members keep a running tally of the books they read during the year. The goal, as you may have guessed, is to reach 50.

Well, I was pretty bad at remembering to log in and record everything I read, but I found I really liked having a record of what I’d read when. I tried keeping track of books in a plain lined journal, but it just wasn’t organized enough for me.

After working at my current bookstore job for a few months, I stumbled upon my perfect solution: Moleskine’s address book. This is not your typical address book! Instead of having boxes with places for name, address, phone number, email, blah blah blah, the Moleskine address book has simply one tab for each letter of the alphabet, followed by pages that contain nothing but those gloriously pale and closely spaced Moleskine lines!

I now list each book under the author’s last name along with the date I finished reading it. I don’t think I’ve missed a book yet, and it’s so cool to be able to look back over what I’ve read over the past year and a half. I haven’t even started a second page in any of the letters, so there’s plenty of space for the books to come!

What about you? Do you keep a record of the books you read?

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