Inhae's blog

I’ve been able to keep up with my resolution to post more often! ☺️

Today, I want to update on my reading journal system, because it changed a lot since the last time I mentioned it.

I decided to embrace the idea of using three different journals, one for each language. This pairs nicely with my reading challenge, because I’m always reading one book in each of the three languages I’m learning. Three languages, three books and three notebooks.

But as I said in a previous post, it would be too expensive to buy three hardcover notebooks at once, so I settled on the 48 pages Midori notebooks. They are the same I’m using for the Genshin Impact journal.

I chose the blank notebooks, so I made this lined sheet that I use when writing, so that everything looks neat.

I still haven’t labelled them (I’m terrified I would mess up the label and the cover with it…), so I need to flip through each of them before finding the right one lol.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of people doing reading journals (and bullet journals in general), but nothing really applied to what I wanted to do, and I had no clear idea of what spreads I wanted to have. And anyway, these notebooks are very thin, I will have to change them often, so I didn’t think yearly spreads would work. The more I was thinking about all this, the more I was scared to start, so I just gave up on the idea to imitate what I was seeing on YouTube and just do me.

So I kept the first page for an index and that’s it, no spreads and no decoration.

I’m not super happy with this index, but it will do until I find another layout. I decided to go with hearts instead of stars for the rating, because it’s more a gauge of my enjoyment when reading the book rather than how good I think the book is, but maybe I’ll end up cutting the rating and the dates, and just keep the title, author and the corresponding page in my notebook.

I also decided to give up on decorations, collage, stickers, etc. because I’m bad at working on page composition and layout. Simple and sober is more my style, so even though I have a lot of washi tapes and other stationery items I could use, I went for a minimalist style with limited supplies.

I’m using a Jinhao 82 fountain pen, EF nib, the quality of this pen is insane compared to the cheap price. I bought this one on AliExpress because I couldn’t find a local retailer that sold them.

I had a hard time finding a good black ink, because the ones I had kept smudging to the point where I could not touch anything I had written, just putting my fingers on the ink would make it smudge 😭. I think it comes from the notebook because I don’t have this problem with other types of paper. Someone on Mastodon suggested I tried pigment ink so I bought two samples.

I tried Sailor Kiwaguro and Platinum Carbon Black and the Platinum is my favourite one. It works extremely well with the Midori. Finding the perfect pen-ink-paper combination feels good.

Back to my journal, I’m just doing an entry per book with general information at the beginning (title, author, number of pages, format, dates, etc.), then a list of characters and a summary as well as some personal thoughts at the end.

Typically, a book takes around 4 pages, but it depends of course. I’m trying to draw at least one illustration per book. something that’s related to the story or inspired by the cover. I wanted to draw more in these notebooks, but I’m drawing a lot in my Genshin notebooks already, and I’m lacking time to take care of these ones, so one book at least ended up without illustration.

I’m just realising as I’m writing that I’ve been using a pigment ink pen to draw and my fountain pen to write, but this was before I switched to a pigmented ink for the fountain pen. So now I could use the fountain pen to draw to, and go with a “one notebook one pen” concept here too.

This one is the only drawing I made that’s directly a copy of part of the cover, and my current read in Chinese.

That’s it for my reading journals! I’m not entirely satisfied with how they look, I wish I had a more unified layout across the books, but I’ll figure it out as I go!

Next post will be the (few…) books I read in November.

About

I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.

Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.

Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.