The Fountain Pen Blog

Keeping track of what I read in a year has turned into a fun annual project that helps me read more consistently. Each year, I try to read a bit more than the last, clawing back time from social media and doom scrolling.

There are lots of ways to do this. In 2023, I made a list on a piece of paper. Some people use Goodreads, Storygraph, a spreadsheet, or other apps. Those are perfectly valid, and definitely easier approaches to tracking your reading.

Making a chart-filled, aesthetic reading journal from a blank notebook was a craft project that took hours of work over multiple days. This isn’t something all or even most readers should feel the need to do.

If you want a reading journal without the arts and crafts, you can order them on sites like Etsy. You can also decrease the total work by purchasing downloadable journal pages (or trying my file at the end of this post for free). I just wanted to do it myself.

Getting Started

I used a dotted notebook. The dots made it easy to plan and draw charts.

For decorations, I went to a craft store and bought some colorful paper. This allowed me to create the opening pages shown at the top of this post.

I still love how it looks on the inside, but in hindsight I wish I’d minimized how much paper I added to the book, and/or cut away some pages to make up for the added bulk. A book cover is made to be the right size for its pages. By gluing in extra paper, I’ve made the book significantly thicker.

The rating system, journal spreads, and charts I used generally came from pictures and videos I found online, with slight modifications for my preferences.

Materials Used:

• 1 blank dotted journal (I used a Paperage dotted journal) – not an affiliate link.
• Decorative paper
• Scissors (regular and scalloped edge)
• Glue
• Pencil and eraser
• Ruler
• Black pen
• Yellow highlighter (or your preferred color)
• A computer (see file at bottom of post)
• A printer
• Colored pencils
• Flex-nib fountain pen
• Reference images from reading journals on the internet

The Process

I gathered the above materials, selected what charts and spreads I wanted to use, and got to work.

First, I took a pencil and faintly wrote in the headers at the top of each page. This helped me reserve pages and plan what order they’d go in. Next, I typed up the graphics I wanted to use printouts for: headers, the rating system, a spread with spaces for book covers and star ratings. If you want to use any of my printed graphics or modify them as a starting point, I’ve included the downloadable word document at the end of this post.

Next, I used a ruler to draw the lines for each of the charts and spreads. I played with a flex nib fountain pen on separate paper I glued in for some of the headers just for a fun chance to attempt some calligraphy. You can always just do all the headers by hand or on the computer.

After that, it was a matter of decoration. Cutting out the headers and decorative paper, gluing in the rating system and book cover spreads. Handwriting or coloring in anything I didn’t include, like the stars in the rating system chart and what they mean.

For each book, I did a single-page review. I picked up 30 books over the course of the year, but I only finished 29 due to a DNF early in the year. But hey, 29 is two more than what I read in 2023!

The Finished Journal

Here are the final spreads as of the end of the year.

The CAWPILE rating system was created by Book Roast. It helps make the 5 star review system more thorough.

I included a Read My Shelf page to encourage me to read books I’ve had for a while that I hadn’t read or in a few cases, wanted to reread. A lot of these were gifts I’ve been hanging on to or books I’ve had since I was a kid.

I loved this reading stats spread. I’m especially proud that I read 8 books I already owned and 16 library books. That means 24 out of the 30 books I opened up last year were NOT added to my personal collection, saving space and money in a year when I was frankly dealing with job loss, moving, and not in a good space to buy non-essentials. (I didn’t know that yet when I went out and bought a bunch of craft supplies for this project, but hey, some decorative paper was way cheaper than buying all new books in 2024.)

I like the daily tracking system which helps me visualize if I’m spending time on reading and writing regularly, but I stopped filling out the writing tracker below in the late summer, even though I was definitely writing. 2024 was a particularly intense year for my family, and the later months of the year had a lot of big decisions as we figured out if we needed to move and then had to make that happen.

Possibly the most important section in this journal was writing a single-page review of every book I read. The numbers in the corner track how many books I picked up to read throughout the year. I track how long it took me to read each book by date, make my CAWPILE scores, then I fill the rest of the page with thoughts on each book. I’m not taking a ton of time to write these. They’re just my raw thoughts when I finish.

What I’d Do Differently

In my 2025 journal, I’m continuing to use the same notebook, but trying to minimize my use of glued-in paper to add less bulk to the journal. Instead of decorative paper behind the headers, I’ve switched to rubber stamps. I also printed my book covers/star ratings template and used it as a stencil to hand draw them instead.

I’ve changed the genres in my genre tracker for 2025 because so many books fall in multiple genres, and I realized including YA as one of the main categories was a mistake. It always overlaps with something else. For instance, in 2024 I read a bunch of sci-fi YA, and there was nothing in the sci-fi category until I added the dotted line “books from other genres” section to account for it. I swapped in the Mystery genre for 2025 since I read more of those last year than I expected.

While the Book of the Year page was fun to fill out, it left me a bit frustrated when I realized my most prolific reading months sometimes included multiple books that should have made it further in the brackets, only to be eliminated by another highly rated book because I read it in the same month. I’m still using this spread in 2025, but I may eliminate it in the future if I feel it’s not really contributing to my reading experience.

Free download:
Printable reading journal template (word doc)

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