Blog —
A Reading Journal App for the Books You Finish
Someone asks what you read last year, and you remember three books. You know there were more. There was the one on the train in March, the one a friend lent you and never asked back, the one you finished at two in the morning. They were good. They’re gone.
A reading journal is how the books stay. Not as reviews or a reading score, just a place where each finished book leaves a mark.
A record, not a race
Reading trackers can turn into a contest with yourself: fifty books, a hundred, a number to beat in front of other people. Some readers love that. For many of us it changes what we pick up, toward short books and away from the slow one we actually wanted.
A record asks nothing of the next book. It only remembers the last one.
What a reading journal app is
A reading journal app keeps track of the books you read on your phone: which ones you finished, what you thought of them, what kind of books they were, and how much you read on a given day. In DayBloq it isn’t a separate app. It’s a set of reading pages inside a journal, and three of them are free.
Book Rating: nine books, star by star
A Book Rating page holds nine books. Tap the label on a book and type its name. Then tap the book, rub each star you give it, and tap Done. When the nine are full, add another page. One look of Book Rating is free; two more are part of VIP.
Book Blocks: one block for each book
Book Blocks is free too. The shapes on the left are genres: romance, spirituality, thriller, self-help, sci-fi, biography, fantasy and novels. When you finish a book, hold its genre and drop it on the grid, one block for each book. Drag a block back to the left side to remove it. By the end of the year the grid shows what you read, not as a list but as a pile.
Reading: a year in pages
The Reading page is a Year in Pixels for reading: one square for each day, colored by how many pages you read. The key runs 0-30 pages, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120 and 121 or more. It’s the page for the days in between finished books, when you read a little, or a lot, or nothing at all.
What it doesn’t do
Worth saying plainly, so nobody downloads it for the wrong reason:
- There is no book search. You type the title yourself.
- There is no barcode scanner, and no covers pulled in from a catalog.
- It won’t suggest what to read next.
It’s a journal, not a library. If you want a database of every edition, other tools are built for that. If you want a page that is yours, where a book only exists because you wrote it down, this is closer.
Setting it up
- In DayBloq, open Supplies, then Pages, and tap the Books chip.
- Preview Book Rating, Book Blocks or Reading, tap Use this page, and pick a journal. Add all three to the same journal if you like; All at the bottom shows every page at once.
- Add the book you finished most recently. Just the one.
- Don’t go back for the whole year’s list unless you want to. The journal starts from today, and that’s fine.
Starting a new journal? The Starter set, under Start with a set, is free and already holds Reading, Book Rating and Book Blocks. The Book lover set comes with VIP and adds pages such as Audiobook, Podcast, Writing and a Bingo card. What VIP costs is on the FAQ.
The Reading grid works like any other Year in Pixels, and DayBloq is on Android.
Next in this series: the fourth Thursday of November is a day many people keep for being thankful. Next, journal ideas for that week, one line and one color a day.