It’s that time again, friends! One of my favorite rituals in December is looking at my annual reading log, wrapping up books, filling in information about what I read, and absorbing all of the wondrous bookish stats that the reading log generates! I also love prepping a new year of reading, and a new year of the reading log. Something about filling up a brand new spreadsheet fills me with immense joy!
We continue to make tweaks and improvements to the reading log, and this year is no different! If you’re an impatient person, click here to access the 2022 reading log. Remember that in order to get your own copy of it, you’ll need to be logged into your Google account. Then, go to the upper lefthand corner of the page, click File > Make a copy. A pop-up will appear asking where to your own drive you want to save it. Once you save it to your drive, you can exit the spreadsheet, go to your Drive, and access your own editable version!
Keep reading for an update on what’s new and improved, a video walkthrough, and —new this year — a simplified version of the log for those of you who want just the basics!
What’s New
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This year’s reading log doesn’t look too different from past years, but we did remove one field and add a couple new ones on the main tracking tab. After discussing it internally, and in light of We Need Diverse Books no longer using the term #OwnVoices, we decided to retire the #OwnVoices designation on the tracker. There are multiple ways to track books by authors of color, queer authors, trans and nonbinary authors, and international books, so it felt superfluous, and being specific about an author or character’s identity is more valuable than an umbrella term.
We also added a disability rep tracker, because disability visibility is important! So far, it just tracks whether or not a book has disability representation, and if the author self-identities as disabled.
You’ll notice there is now a way to track books by trans authors or starring trans protagonists. This might feel redundant since we already have a column for LGBTQIA+ representation, but multiple readers have asked for a way to specifically track trans rep, as there are so many more great trans books being published recently, and some of you have decided you want to increase your reading in that area. This was the easiest and cleanest way I could think to do it.
Due to a few requests, we added a field for tracking original language if a book is translated. Some readers really enjoy knowing what percentage of their reading is translated and what the language break down is, and I think it’s a great idea if you want to try and read more translated lit. (I found myself gravitating towards a lot of Japanese lit in 2021, for example — I’d love to spice things up in 2022, and I think this will help!)
And of course, you can always find the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge incorporated into the reading log! This coming year’s challenge is full of fresh and exciting new challenges and a few throwback challenges!
The Reading Log Walk-Through
As in previous years, the reading log is a private, Sheets-based spreadsheet that you save to your personal Drive. Once your editable version is available on your Drive, no one else can access it, and you can customize to your hearts’ content, changing everything from the color scheme to adding options to genre, format, and more, and even deleting or adding criteria. In the YouTube video below, I walk you through every step of using the log and customizing!
The Reading Log Simplified
I know that many people love the stats and the charts, but I also know that filling out the full reading log is a hobby in and of itself and, let’s be real, pretty time consuming. So many people delete the fields that they don’t want, and I completely respect that! This reading log should work for you! But because I got so many requests, I decided to make a simplified version of the log for those of you who want in on the action, but are intimidated by messing about too much in Sheets. It tracks just title, author, finish date, length, genre, format, and diversity, and you still get the stats and charts!
Click here to access the simplified 2022 reading log. As with the one above, you’ll want to click File > Make a copy, then save it to your personal drive. That puts an editable version in your hands, and you can track without getting overwhelmed!
Feel free to share this log far and wide, and I hope that you have yet another bountiful bookish year in 2022!
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