I've been keeping a reading journal since I was twenty-two and I want to be honest about what that's taught me. The books I wrote about most extensively are not always the books I valued most. Sometimes I wrote at length about a book because it frustrated me. Sometimes a book that changed me sits in the journal as two lines because I didn't have words for what it did.

The journal is useful for a different reason than I expected: it tells me what I was interested in at particular times of my life. Looking back at my entries from the year I had a bad job, I was reading almost entirely about work, meaning, and escape. The books were Kafka, Le Carré, and a lot of Pratchett. That tells me something true about that period that memory doesn't preserve as clearly.

If you're going to keep a reading journal, don't try to write reviews. Write about what the book touched in you.