I read this article in the New York Times a few weeks ago, a personal essay describing the author’s “Book of Books,” an aging notebook kept for over ten years in which she jots down the title of each read book. I find something romantic about that idea, but I am the type of person who finds most notebooks romantic. However, I am a woman who loses notebooks, spills things upon them, carries them in her backpack on a rainy day rendering everything she owns to become quite soggy. I could never keep a notebook in the same place that I was reading without losing it, destroying it, or leaving it somewhere odd to be forgotten.

Enter: the blog. I will never lose/abandon/forget my blog. A list kept on the info page of my ancient Livejournal, years and years before LibraryThing and Goodreads existed; it was the first time I was able to keep track. It became a habit, to read, to finish, to log on and add a line to my growing list.

My blog in its current format has slowly evolved from this habit, this process, of documenting what I read. Like Paul and her tattered BoB, it serves me in some kind of nostalgic, narcissistic way – I can look back over what I’ve read, over the years, and remind myself of the summer I read nothing but romance, the year I read The Boyfriend List 3 times, the semester I slogged through the thousands of pages of forgotten 19th Century fiction, the time I read through the Harry Potter series in two months and when I closed the 7th book, I immediately ran back to The Sorcerer’s Stone. I can make charts and graphs and count pages and genres and see my preferences and patterns over long periods of time. I can spend hours thinking about myself and my reading and what that means to me.

It’s a comfort, a pleasure, to read and to think about what I’ve read and to self-monitor and to gaze upon my accomplishments. I think that reading makes my life better, and I like to reflect on this phenomenon.

I like to think about why certain stories feel appropriate for different people, different settings, different uses.

How people move from book to book, how they decide when to put one down, how they decide which books are “best.”

I like to think about how I can help others find this same comfort that I feel when I am surrounded by lists of books.