A Book Journal to Change Your Life

Books and reading have the power to transform our lives.

We meet new friends, travel to new locations, experience new perspectives and learn valuable life lessons with each turn of the page.

And, when we explore the themes of the book in our own lives, from love and relationships to baking and gardening, magic happens.

The book leaves us a better person than when we started.

I’ve learned that what I pay attention to grows stronger over time and paying closer attention to my reading life was making my actual life better. I felt less alone. I learned new things. I tried new hobbies. I got healthier. I broadened my ideas of what was possible. I gained more empathy. I learned how to be a better person.

But so much of the book world today is about numbers: tracking how many days we’ve read, posting the number of books we’ve read this month, setting our yearly challenge on our Goodreads account and chasing the never-ending quest to read the latest releases along with the rest of the world.

But reading isn’t about numbers.

It’s about the titles we chose to bring into our lives, the author’s we’ve come to know through their words, the lessons we learn through the pages, the quotes that touch our heart, the concepts that could potentially change our life for knowing them and the feelings we want to hold onto.

Over the years, I started creating my own reading notebooks to help me reflect on my reading life. I abandoned the statistics that didn’t really matter to me, like the number of pages in the book, the dates I started and stopped reading and a basic summary.

Instead, I tracked why I chose to read it, the life lessons I was learning, the quotes that touched my heart, the themes I was pondering, the writing it sparked in my notebook and who I might share this book with because they needed it, too.

I even created my own rating scheme in hearts, not stars, to rate the impact the book had on me, not the quality of the writing as those are two very different things.

And now, I’m bringing it to you. After years of finding my own way in this bookish journey, I invite you to join me in harnessing the power of our reading lives to improve the quality of our actual lives, too.