I never thought I would end up starting a blog but after being suggested I thought I would give this a go.
I am quite late starting this blog as I started my goals at the start of the year so I will be doing probably two or three posts as a January catch up before I start my posts for February onwards. Lets start with a little introduction and how I set up my journal for the year.
So a bit about me. Hi there, my name is Shayne. I am a recently avid reader. By recently I mean that before mid October 2023 I couldn’t really read. in my child hood I remember loving reading my bookshelf was full of my favourites including works by Michael Morpurgo and Darren Shan, but as I got older into my mid teens I started to struggle with reading. The words would confuse me and tire out my eyes. For years I put it down to the way my brain works and ended up becoming a book hoarder in hopes one day I would be able to read all the books I’ve picked up on the way.
Last year (2023) I decided I’d had enough and took a chance on an eye test. just by looking I never thought there was anything wrong with my sight, but this test proved me wrong. turns out my right eye was weak and my left eye was working double time to make up for it which caused my eyes to often go in and out of focus and wear them out quicker. since finding this out and getting glasses I was very emotional to find I could read again, and so my bookworm life began!
So let’s get started on this year with my journal set up and goals I have set myself for 2024.
Introduction to 2024
After watching a lot of videos on YouTube of people’s reading journals I decided to one of my own and what journal would be complete without a intro page?
I am not going to lie I did not really plan this page apart from knowing I wanted the rustic scrap book look and after years of having pen pals I had a lot of stickers, stamps and scrap paper that would do well for the whole project.
Even with the lack of planning or concept I really love how this intro spread turned out in the end.
24 For 2024
For my first tracker spread I decided to set myself a goal for the minimum amount of books I wish to read throughout the year.
I decided to settle for 24 giving me a minimum of 2 books a month so that if I needed a break at any point I would be able to.
with how many books I read towards the end of 2023 I knew this would be an easier goal but with this being my first year tracking my reading I didn’t want to push myself too much and cause myself to be pushed away from reading.
this page I feel looks quite bare but as the year goes on the slots will fill up with the covers of the books I read.
Book Bingo
Since I got back into reading I have been reading mainly fantasy books as it’s a genre I love no matter the format and is a comfort zone for me. with this being my first full year back reading I wanted to make something that would make me push those comfort boundaries and explore other parts of literature.
I saw the idea of book bingo in so many of the YouTube videos I watched and decided to do one for myself to help me read different things in hopes of completing the page.
some of the goals I think will be most challenging for me would be reading a translated work and completing a series. I do know that some books I read may fill more than one bingo slot.
I can’t wait to see if I will complete this years book bingo and what books I will find to fill the slots.
Series Tracker
Since I got back into reading last year I did start a few series so I decided to make a tracker page for book Series’ that I am currently reading and wish to start in the year ahead. this will also help with my bingo slot of completing a series.
Some of the series I chose was because of how much I had heard about them such as ACOTAR, Crescent City and Married to Magic.
The other series on the tracker are series I’ve wanted to read for a while due to watching things that was based off of them such as Miss Peregrines, The Vampire Chronicles, Harry Potter and American gods.
The final series I chose was Disney Villains as I had the first 4 books on my shelf for a good while and as I had enjoyed them at the end of 2023 I’m hoping to catch up with the series through this year as the books are quite short reads and quite easy reads.
To Be Read
I’m sure every person who likes to read had a To Be Read/TBR list be it in a notebook or journal, an amazon Wishlist or even using apps like Good Reads.
I mostly use Good Reads and my TBR list on that is insane and I honestly don’t doubt there are books on it that I will never get round to reading as the list is ever growing. That is why I wanted to set up a To Be read page in my journal that has books in it that I no doubt want to make sure I read at some point this year either cause they are a book I’ve had for a while or a book I’m super excited to read that I’ve seen online.
I wanted this page to have a good range of styles of books so that I’m not trapping myself into one type or genre. I did this by including books of different genres and a non fiction in the form of Miriam Margolyes’ Auto Biography which I am so excited to read. Hopefully by the end of 2024 all these books will have a green tick on them.
Daily Tracker
I thought I would do one tracker that I would come back to every day. this spread is to track the amount of pages I read each day so that when I come to do my end of month and end of year stats I can easily look back and work out my amount of pages in total which I think will be amazing to see.
at the end of the year I’ll be able to see which month I read the most pages in and even work out my average per month.
I decided to do a colour key as through the year it’ll make this page look a lot more interesting. I set my highest as 140+ as it’s not very often I read over 100 pages in a day and it would show how good the book is if I read through that much of it in one go.
Can’t wait to see how this spread looks when it’s all filled in at the end of the year.
Month introduction
And that is the end of my trackers leading me into the start of my book per page reviews.
I wanted to do these pages in sections per month so starting with a January intro page I thought would be the perfect idea to separate the pages of the trackers and the reviews and then for each month too.
With the theme for this page I went with a winter wonderland as January still had the bitter cold and honestly it’s more common to see snow in January than at the end of the year.
I decided to add a quote for the month that I believe is from a poem:
“January is here,
with eye’s that keenly glow,
a frost-mailed warrior,
striding a shadowy steed of snow” ~ Edgar Fawcett
With all the set up done I was ready for the year to start. My next post will be a quick view over some of the books I read through January!
Thankyou for reading my first post! i’d love to know what you guys think! let me know in the comments. what is your favourite tracker? would you start a journal?
I am always looking for book suggestions so feel free to let me know in the comments books you think I should read!
thankyou again and I hope you’ll see my next one!
One response to “Hello world! Let’s Get Started!”
Threadneedle for sure!
Love this. Can’t wait to follow along