Hey, guys. Julia here. Welcome to another video. And today I'm walking you through my new reading journal set up. This is my second reading journal, and I've learned a lot from the first one for sure. I will be showing clips here and there of how this all came together, but I wanted to more so talk about the initial spreads that I'm setting up here and how I'll be using them to hopefully give you some ideas as well for your own reading journal. All right, guys, I'm going to walk you through my initial spreads and my new 2023 reading journal. And I'm super excited about it. My last reading journal was in a traveler sized notebook, and it lasted me two years. And so I decided to go a little bigger this year and do and A5 Journal from Odyssey Journals. I did a whole video about all the journals I'm using for this year, and I'll be sure to link that for you in the description and up in the card opening up here, I decided to do something a little different and I took one of my favorite pieces from Esao Andrews, who's this amazing oil painter. One of my favorites. But I printed out one of his pieces on some sticker paper and just covered the inside cover. And this first page. I thought this would be cool for an inside cover for Reading Journal just because it gives me those vibes. Like I love being transported into another place while I'm reading. And so this says Welcome Home. So I just thought it was perfect for the inside cover. And yeah, flipping over. Have another Esao piece here that I again printed out on sticker paper and I just thought it kind of went well with this welcome home. But then also like in the clouds and this like mystical, fantastical looking drawing. So yeah, this has also been a wallpaper, I think on my iPad, probably on my computer as well. But yeah, I love this piece. And I actually decided to base the first few pages on this color scheme. So I did add some washi here. And this is from notebook therapy. This is their vintage Rose collection. Yeah, I just have a cover page here and down here.

I'm going to write in how long this goes to. So right now is January 2023 until we shall see maybe another two years or maybe one year we'll see. Flipping over. This is my to be read spread and I actually have more than just this for the TBR in my last journal I learned that the TBR list is ever growing and there's probably there's never enough room for a TBR list, but I tried to just give myself a little bit more here. So I have a spread here in the air that means acquired. So once I get the book, whether that be on a Kindle or from the library or buy it physically or whatever, I'll check when I have the book ready to read and then once it's read and it's pretty much off the TBR, I will fill this in here and I did want to keep it really minimal. I bumped up the margins on all the side. Usually I would go out, you know, a little further, but I was just feeling a larger margin for this year. There's something very calming about having that extra white space, so I decided to do that there. Flipping over, I have another page for it to be read. And then on this right side I have a recommended TBR, so people recommend books pretty often and I kind of want to keep those separate from the to be read that way. If I do read a recommended TBR and I really love it, then I can be like, Hey, thanks for recommending that and here I'll know if I read it, what it is and who it was. Recommend it by so I can go back and be like, you know, your recommendations are legit or kind of figure out who has the same tastes as me. So I'm down for recommendations. Leave them in the comments. Okay. Flipping over this next spread is a little bit of a mishmash of things, and that's totally fine. So up here we have my annotations base key and I do annotate a lot of the times and annotations change from book to book. So this is just sort of my default at the front of books. I will have like a little thing that I post in there that will have like exactly what all of the different tabs mean.

Sometimes I have a totally different color scheme than what's going on here, but this is just if there's no beginning of the book slip or just for a reference, I think here is just kind of what I'm using as far as annotation tab. So yellows or quotes or writing that I love green is character description and character development. I like kind of tracking and character descriptions just in case I get a wild hair and want to draw a character, really fall in love with the character, and I can go back and see like what color their hair is, what their style was, and just kind of quickly find those things. So blue is sad moments, purple, relatable moments, orange funny moments, pink, romantic and sweet interactions. And then below the annotations key. I have the ratings system and my last journal. This kind of helped me out a bit when I'm rating books after I finish them. So my five star means that I couldn't put it down. It's a new favorite. A forest star means I loved it. It had some sort of significant impact on me. Three stars I liked. It could have been better. Two stars. I want it to like it like it was. Maybe like I just missed. And then one star means I DNF’d it or I just thought it was a waste of time and it was just sucky. So that is my current rating baseline. And then on this other side I have reading realizations. So I don't know, I'm trying to figure out exactly what I like, what I don't like as far as tropes, as far as genre, I'm still kind of out here just reading all the things to figure out what I like. So maybe I was thinking here that I could write some notes. Like if I read, I don't know, I'm just going to come up with a random example right now. If I read like three Enemies to Lovers, and I'm like, I think this is my thing that I can write. I think I like enemies to lovers. So just be interesting to see. Like in the course of this next year, what I conclude about my reading preferences. So we have that there.

Okay, flipping over. This is pretty empty right now because we are not at the end of the year yet. But I am going to do my 2022 stats here and I get that information from Goodreads. I'll put my Goodreads information in the description below if you want to follow me there. Sometimes I write reviews. A lot of the times I just keep up with my progress and rate things. But every now, every now and again I will write a review. But if you want to be my friend on there, feel free. I won't have room in my current reading journal to do this. So I thought I'll just do it here. And this is stuff like how many pages I read the entire year. The shortest book. The longest book. I can't remember the rest of the stats but yeah, I've done this previously and I will show you the previous year's Stats page. Whenever I do a reading journal, flip through, make sure you subscribe. So you are here to see that flip through. So on this page I have my 2023 goals and last year my goal was 20 books. And right now, currently in the middle of November, I'm at 44, I want to say so, yeah, I don't know. Again, I don't know if that's a fluke or not. I don't know what's going on with me, but that's way more books than I thought I was going to be able to read. And 2022. So in 2023, I'm going with 40 and we'll see how it goes. Maybe after this year, if I hit this 40 and go way beyond, I might just hype it up a bit. I don't know. I don't know. It scares me. But very excited about this 2023 Goals page and this is pretty self-explanatory. When I finish a book, I just color in the square and then at the end of the year I'll see, you know, my goal is 40 and then I'll write in how many I actually read. Okay, this next page or spread rather is the book bracket. And here I am trying to figure out what my favorite book of the year is. So every month I will go through, you know, my monthly, what I read pages and pick a favorite, eep! it scares me to pick a favorite. But I will attempt to pick a favorite for every month, and then those months will go head to head and then, yeah, I'll get down to figure out what my favorite book of the year is.

So that's just a visual representation of this bracket. So yeah, and actually it was pretty hard to figure out how to put this together because with the 12 months and it gets down to the six, well, it's a not even situation. So what's this? The winner of March and April and the winner of September and October will get two chances to to be a favorite. So and a little wonky. But, you know, whatever. I think it will be fun to do. It's my first year doing it. So we'll see. Okay. The next two spreads are my 2023 reads and here I'll just have the book covers for all the books that are read. I'll also have the star rating underneath and then right beside it on the left, I'll put a bar to indicate the format that the book was in. So I'll do yellow for physical, purple for e-book and blue for audiobook. And let me show you from my last reading journal what that looks like. So yeah, this is how this page ends up looking like this is from 2022 books read. And so yeah, you see that I have the star rating underneath and then the color bar for whatever type of format that it is. And, and this journal I did not give myself enough room so the to 2023 books read spreads are separated so hopefully doing two spreads in this journal and having a larger journal. Hopefully this is enough room for all of the books. So yeah. So right after this spread, I will start with my January cover page and January TBR and days read and all that stuff and then follow with the books. So flipping back to the back cover. So this is something somewhat new. If you look at my reading journal from last year, I just have some extra book fan art back here along with this little envelope. And this is where I kept all of the book covers that I printed, but I want it to be a little extra this time around. Now, the I really just want it to be a little more organized because having all of these covers and one envelope got a little chaotic.

So I have these little sticky pouches and these are actually made for like Polaroids to go in. And I will be using these for for Polaroids as well. But I thought it was perfect for this. So back here I just have all of my covers, not all of them, but just ones that I think that I'm going to be reading sometime soon. Or like my physical TBR is in here, but so I have them broken down by genre. So I think this will help a lot with mood reading. So if I'm in the mood for a fantasy or a sci fi, I know to kind of look in here or just dump out this one or whatever, it'll just be a little easier to find. What I'm looking for with them. Separate it out like this. So and I think it's cool. It's cute back here. So, so yeah. I hope you guys enjoyed taking a look at my initial spreads in my reading journal. Let me know in the comments if you have a reading journal and what type of spreads you use in yours. I definitely want to know. I need some inspiration. Also, be sure to give this video a like. If you've enjoyed subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Thank you so much. If you have and yeah, I will catch you guys in the next one. And if you like this video, here are a couple more I think you would enjoy.