A Very Special and Extremely Dorky Bookish Anniversary

On June 2, my trusty reading journal turned 25 years old! This single Word document now consists of 1,745 single-spaced pages and (this is truly crazy) 1,221,968 words (basically two War and Peaces). 

Here's the story: Way back in 2001, before Goodreads or any other way to keep track of books on the Web, I started this Word document I titled "list." Every time I'd finish reading a book, I'd sit down and spend 20 minutes (or often longer) writing about it -- why I picked it up in the first place, what I thought of it, key plot points, etc. And even though much easier and more sophisticated ways to track reading became available over the years, I stuck with my tried-and-true (and so GenX) method. 

This single document has been with me through four cities, about a dozen apartments, half a dozen laptops (I used to back this thing up manually on a thumb drive -- now it's backed up in the cloud), and more life events than I could even list.  The first book I wrote about -- on June 2, 2001 -- was John Updike's Rabbit Run. The most recent one, last week, was Rachel Leon's debut How We See The Gray. And there are 1,281 books in between. 

I know that total, because I always include a "finished on" date on my reading journal when I write about the book. In about 2009 when I first joined Goodreads, I backfilled all the books I'd read before that point into my new Goodreads account. So Goodreads also now goes all the way back to June 2, 2001. Peak book nerd achieved! 

Why is this journal so important to me? Beyond the simple idea that I just enjoy doing it, one of the reasons I've kept it up for so long and so meticulously is that I'm terrified of forgetting what I've read -- that in some future, the time spent with past books will be forgotten, and therefore erased. What could be worse than simply forgetting about an old friend?

But also, I can't tell you how valuable the reading journal has been for me as I've moved through a bookish life. Sure, if a sequel comes out, I can easily go back and find out what happened in the first one (and what I thought). But it's also helped me immensely as I've written about books more frequently. Just as one example: If you've ever tried to make a book list, and not sound repetitive, you know it's not easy -- this journal has helped me drudge back up specific details about books I read literally decades ago. 

The day I started this journal, I wrote: "Hopefully I’ll be reading this list (with a few hundred pages) when I’m 60." Welp, younger me, it's a few THOUSAND pages, and the odd are pretty good that if I make it to 60, so will this.