Keep a Reading Journal for Your Horror Fiction Books

Here’s a “Blast from the Past”. I revised and updated this post which I wrote almost two years ago.

What is a Reading Journal?

If you read a lot of horror fiction books, or if you read widely in any genre, you’ll want to keep a reading journal.

A Reading Journal is a notebook, a collection of notebooks, a computer program or Internet website that contains short summaries of the books you’ve read. It’s also a place to keep the list of books you want to read.

At it’s most basic, you read a book and then create an entry about it in your journal with enough information to jog your memory years from now, when you’re trying to remember what the book was about.

If you’re a serious reader than you ought to start keeping a reading journal. If you’re a writer than you absolutely must be keeping a journal.

What is a Capture System?

A capture system is some method for keeping notes of quotes, ideas or plot points as they occur during your reading without interrupting the flow of your reading.

At its most basic, the capture system is the method you use to take notes before you enter the book into your reading journal.

We’ll talk about capture systems tomorrow.

Two Great Systems that Work Together

I propose that you create a reading journal and a capture system together. Using them together makes keeping the journal easier and ensures you remember to add all the interesting things you encounter in the story.

Why Keep a Reading Journal?

There are many reasons to keep a reading journal:

1. When you write down information about a book you’ve read, it helps lock that information in your brain. Humans have three ways to learn, called modalities: the auditory modality, the visual modality and the kinesthetic modality. We excel in one modality, less so in the other two. By reading a book and then writing about it, you engage multiple modalities which further cements what you’ve learned.
2. A reading journal keeps track of the books you’ve read and the ones you want to read. Have you ever picked up a book only to find, 5 pages into the story, that you’ve already read it? Have you been in a bookstore and found a book you wanted to purchase but couldn’t be positive that you didn’t own it already? Keeping a reading journal can help you avoid these situations.
3. Keeping a reading journal fosters the development of critical thinking skills. Don’t let the term “critical thinking skills” scare you off. Just writing summaries and keeping a journal, no matter how simple it may be, will set you on the path to develop your thinking skills.
4. Keeping a reading journal improves your writing skills over time. The more you write the better your writing becomes.
5. Your reading journal is a quick reminder when you’re looking for books to recommend to your friends and family. I’ve found that no matter how sharp I think I am, there are dozens of titles I forget to mention that come back to me when I leaf through my reading journal.
6. The reading journal is an ideal place to keep lists of series in the order you want to read them. A good reading journal contains more than just what you’ve read. It will have a place where you keep a list of the books you want to read, the authors you want to read and the series order for the series that you want to read.

A reading journal serves as a back-up to your memory.

How to Make a Reading Journal

You can make a reading journal using any of these items:

1. Spiral Bound Notebook:

Pros: Cheap and easy to acquire. Notebooks come in wide-rule, college-rule or narrow-rule so you want to select the notebook that you’d be comfortable writing in.

Cons: Paper is trapped in place so you can’t re-order the information.

2. Loose Leaf Notebook:

Pros: Inexpensive and easy to acquire. The loose leaf notebook may have plastic or metal rings that open up to allow you to add paper or re-order the information into something meaningful to you.

Cons: loose leaf notebooks tend to be more cumbersome than spiral bound notebooks to carry around and sometimes the clips — metal and plastic — get knocked out of alignment letting papers slip out.

3. Bound Lined Notebook:

Pros: These tend to look attractive and are easy to transport. Select your notebook for the kind of paper inside — lined, blank, half lined half blank or switching off lined and blank. Blank pages in a reading journal serves artistic types well as they can illustrate scenes from the book, make collages, create a mind map of a book’s plot, theme and characters, and more.

Cons: Paper is trapped in place so you can’t re-order the information.

4. A Wordprocessor or Spreadsheet:

Pros: These tend to look attractive and corrections are easy and penmanship is not an issue. Select your type of program — word processor or spreadsheet — then select your brand — Microsoft, Open Office, something else.

Cons: Too many upgrades to a program might leave your old work in the dust. Even if you carry the files on a flashdrive, you need a computer with the right program to open them and read, write or share the information about books within.

5. Internet Book Sites:

Pros: You have a few, free, internet book sites to choose from — LibraryThing, Goodreads, Shelfari to name a few. These sites allow you to turn your reading journal into a social event. These sites tend to have a strong and appealing visual component.

Cons: These sites turn your reading journal into a social event, which will not work for some of us. You are dependant on a computer with Internet access to open them and read, write or share the information about books within.

Book Entry Format

How much information an entry has really depends on your preference. You don’t want to put in too little so as to be useless to you years from now when you want to recall the book nor do you want to put in so much that you’ll give up keeping the readers journal after just the first week or two.

Bare Minimum: You want the book title, author’s name, and a brief description of the story.

Medium Amount: Start with book title, author’s name, and a brief description of the story. Add a section telling what you liked about the book and a section listing other books that read like that one.

Fully Detailed: Start with book title, author’s name, a brief description of the story, tell what you liked about the book and a section listing other books that read like that one. Add sections listing setting, date, character lists, publisher, publishing date, page count, tack on a personal rating system such as 5 stars.

Practice with your format until you find one that you’re comfortable with.

Conclusion

If you’re serious about books, you need to get serious about a book jounal.

If you’re a writer, a librarian or book seller who recommends books to read or just a voracious reader you need to keep a reading journal.

Experiment and find a format that works best for you.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how best to gather the information on a book you’re reading.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Do you keep a reading journal? Would you like to try a reading journal? Was this article helpful?

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Tagged as: Horror Book, Horror Fiction Books, Reading Journal