Reading Journal 2022: looking back

On the Flemish/Dutch part of the blog, I’ve already shared a couple of sneaky looks at my final year spreads for my reading journal of 2022.
I’ve shared my reading statistics*, an overview of all the readathons* I participated in and I made a whole post about reading series* and how I keep track of them, in which I also shared the relevant reading journal spreads. But since there are still a couple of spreads that I haven’t shown again since their initial set-up at the beginning of 2022, I still felt it would be interesting to make a separate post in which I browse through each page with you!

_{* : The mentioned posts are currently only written in my native language (Flemish/Dutch), because I was too lazy to translate them at the time. Additionally, many of my source material, such as my reading journal and my reading spreadsheets are mostly written in Dutch, so I often feel like it wouldn’t be interesting to translate the blog post anyway, due to the many photo’s/screenshots still being fully in Dutch. BUT, if anyone would express interest to read a certain not-translated post in English, feel free to ask me about it 🙂}

My reading journal of 2022 has certainly served me well. The A5-format I used is almost completely filled. I literally have only 3 pages left at the end!

The first 2 spreads have remained unchanged since when I made them at the start of 2022, which was also their purpose.
The first was a title page, with a quote from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, which I found very appropriate for an avid reader. Everyone needs a little escapism sometimes, right?
The second spread is a reference-guide to the review system I use, called BALSPEL, which was completely inspired by and adapted from CAWPILE from BookRoast.
Basically, what I did was translate the English CAWPILE categories to Dutch and also replaced a couple of categories that didn’t work so well for me, when I used the original CAWPILE version. I also made it so that my acronym is an actual word in Dutch (BALSPEL = ball game), because I’m extra like that 😛 .

C – Characters	B – Begin = beginning
A – Atmosphere	A – Atmosfeer = atmorphere
W – Writing style	L – verhaalLijn = plot
P – Plot	S – schrijfstijl = writing style
I – Intrigue	P – personages = characters
L – Logic	E – einde = ending
E – Enjoyment	L – leesplezier = enjoyment

The next couple of spreads is my master list with all books read in 2022; 114 in total.

Next my spread with anticipated releases for 2022, which also shows which of these I actually also read in 2022.
In total I wrote down 43 books, of which I actually read 23. So just over half.

I do notice that this is something that I mainly focus on and keep track of at the beginning of the year. As the year progresses I am less aware of new publications and which ones I look forward to, except when it comes to a follow-up to a series.

This is my spread with the books I physically hauled.
Every year I stubbornly stick to setting up a single double page, but every year I also have to make some adjustment to have enough room. 2022 was no different in that respect, lol.

I bought a total of 90 new books, including all books from the various book boxes to which I’m subscribed. Of all these purchases, I only actually finished reading 37 in 2022, or in some cases were books that I had first read via audio-book or e-book that I absolutely wanted a real copy of.

The next two spreads deals with series.
The first one was to keep track of all my backlog series, to make sure I don’t forget about them. The second one is where I could record new series started.
In the end I also included a new Dutch-door to record some specific statistics pertaining series, which I did explain in this Dutch post.

The next spreads dedicated to my bookbox subscriptions required some Frankensteining throughout the year as well.
The first page on the left was simply a list of all books I had received through various subscriptions before 2022 that I hadn’t yet read.
On the right I only had one table at the beginning of 2022, to record my Fairyloot books of that year, since at that time that was the only subscription I had.
Later on, however, I got a subscription to the new Fairyloot Adult bookservice as well and a couple of months later I also got of the waiting list at Illumicrate. So for these two new subscription boxes, I needed to tape in a new dutch-door tape of page.

As for reading the backlog bookbox-books, I made some progress, but nothing to write home about. Of the 36 listed books, I only read 5 in 2022.
Of the 24 new books that came in in 2022, I finished 7.

The next couple of spreads were made for two year-long readathons.
There was the A to Z challenge, which I mainly added in because I was so in love with this spread from Psychonautjournaling.

The other one is a well-known Flemish challenge, first introduced by Kathleen from the blog Verbeelding.org, which has now started to live its own live on Goodreads.

Then my spread with my 2022 reading goals. My 4 goals were:

• Read 100 books: ✓
• Read 10% in Dutch: ✗
• Read 30% from owned books: ✓
• Read 5 books with more than 550 pages: ✓

My reading trackers, where I keep track of my star-ratings, type of reading format, whether a book is a standalone or part of a series, the target audience and the genres.

Next up is a year-at-a-glance type of thing, with on the left side a graph showing the books & pages read per month and on the right the days read.

This spread was an experiment. I really do like the result, but it took an extra effort to fill it out, since I already ad a lot of quotes in my individual book reviews, so it felt kind of redundant to repeat the same ones. So I didn’t make this spread again for my 2023 reading journal

This was the final spread I set-up at the start of the year. On the left side my favourite books of each month and on the right side the book-bracket for selecting the book of the year.
No surprises there which book won!

But, I am very aware that this method is not really a perfect method of choosing favourites. It happens that I have a month where I only read lackluster books or a month with more than one awesome read. So by forcing to choose by month, some books that otherwise wouldn’t be favourites get selected, and vice versa.

Which is why I had left open a spread at the beginning of the year to have another type of “favourites” selection.
Every year I go about this a little differently, but this year I went for a simple 22 books of 2022.

Normally I also write a separate post about my favourite books of the year, but I don’t know if I’ll still do this for 2022. We are already in the 3rd month of 2023 and it feels a bit outdated. So yeah, if that post doesn’t get written, I can at least refer you to this 😉

Finally, to close of this message, I give you an overview of all my monthly title pages of 2022. Always nice to see!
I am proud of this reading journal. Very pretty, even if I do say so myself!

Cheers,
Charlotte