Reading journal August 2022
Inspiration for my August reading journal was drawn from a sheet of stickers from the brand Decotime that I had bought at Action. It featured pastel coloured stickers of cute animals with flowery crowns. All very sweet, not my usual style, but I liked this one so much I wanted to use it for my reading log.
I ended up using almost none and when I did use one it only came as an afterthought, lol. Funny how inspiration often translates into reality.
I ended up using something else from Action for my title page: a colourful wrapping paper that once came in a booklet of cards. The colours were very close to those of the stickers, so I thought this would go together nicely.
On the left side I covered the entire page with the paper as a background. For the foreground, I went for a bookish photo from Pinterest that I printed out and pasted onto a green card from the same book as the wrapping paper to give it a frame. For the month I drew a banner myself on black paper with a white gel pen. I ended up finishing with some of the stickers from the sticker sheet, but not those of the animals that had given me inspiration.
Of course I went for the same look on the right and it was here that I eventually used one of the stickers of the animals to fill the space around the calendar. I could choose between lion, tiger, zebra, lemur, giraffe and so on, but chose my favourite animal: the elephant.
My TBR of the month was obviously the one for the Magical Readathon and got its own separate spread.
G’s printouts for her readthon are always more in the old-fashioned style of parchment. The previous times I’ve participated in the readathon and featured it in my reading journal, I’ve tried to stay more or less faithful to that style. This time, however, I wanted to stay in the same colourful style as the previous spread.
I do think that I have succeeded in marrying the two styles. The use of a decorative font with sporadically placed elements from the printouts goes well with the colorful background and the green and pink markers I used to write with.
On the left came my TBR for my chosen career of Mage Hunter. As you could see in my August wrap-up, I read all books needed to successfully complete my semester at Orilium.
On the right I wanted to track my progress of my status in my Guild. In hindsight I should have put the Quests at the top and then the progress bar at the bottom, but hey, this works too.
At the bottom are the quests that you could participate in during the month, in addition to your career assignments. Each quest represents a reading assignment and 10 were released at the beginning of the month. Additional Quests appeared later in the month, but I didn’t have room for them anymore in my reading journal, but I solved this by pasting in an fold-out list.
In addition to my 6 career quests, I was able to complete 7 more quests for a total of 70 reputation points within my guild. Along with the points I got for completing my semester, I now have 280 points in my guild and move on to the next level of Revered. This gives me the opportunity to complete an assignment next semester without being faithful to the assignment, just by reading a book, even if it doesn’t fit within that prompt.
However, this semester I was only an Assistant, which gave me the opportunity to count a DNF’ed book, but I didn’t need this advantage, because I read all my books in full!
Anyway, back to the reading journal.
As always, the next spread contains my books read, my monthly statistics and my favorite book of the month. I don’t really have anything to say about this. The format is unchanged from previous months and the style is the same as for the first two spreads of this month.
As always, I conclude with a collage of all the reviews I wrote for the books I read. This month I had a lot to say about many books.
The layout of these pages is not very creative. The use of colors ensures that it is not a big black blob and a simple dividing line provides some more structure.
Inspiration started this month with a sticker sheet, but turned out completely different. I’m not sad about this though, because I think it turned out really cute!
Cheers,
Charlotte
