Happy New Year, besties! I hope that the beginning of the year is treating you well!
With the new year comes new journal setups for me; it’s truly one of my favorite things to do in December. I love setting up a new journal, new monthly spreads, etc. and I had so much fun setting up my 2025 reading journal. December was a very busy and somewhat weird month for me, and sitting down every night to set up my reading journal was so relaxing and centering.
I stopped using my 2024 spreads in September of last year for no reason other than being extremely busy. The way that I had things set up made it a bit difficult to do with my schedule, so I rethought some of my spreads for this year and I think it’s going to help me stay on top of it.
All the journal kits used in this set up are from seasonjours, I love her illustrations and highly recommend checking out her stuff!
Alright, get comfy and cozy and let’s get started!
As always, we start with a cover page. The cover page has really no use except for marking that it’s the start of a new year in the journal. I went with a very simple layout that just says “2025” and then one of my favorite Rory Gilmore quotes on the right side. Then we move into my goals and reading bingo pages. Some of my goals are things that I already do but want to continue to do in 2025 and others are things that I want to become better about. My reading goals for 2025 are:
- Read at least one new to me author per month
- Prioritize my physical tbr
- Read more outside of my comfort zone
- Be more intentional with my book purchases
- Heavier focus on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors/stories
For the reading bingo, I picked things that I can easily achieve. In previous years I picked some really hard prompts and didn’t complete most of them and then would feel bad about myself, so this year I decided to pick more prompts that are definitely achievable. The prompts are:
- Set outside of the U.S.
- Finish a series
- A debut novel
- Participate in a readathon
- Read every book club pick
- Annotate 5 books
- Book with a purple cover
- Recommended by a friend
- A book set in every season
- A book on the banned list
- Published in 1993 (my birth year)
- 5 or more words in the title
- As soon on a BookTube channel
- Read 150 books
- A short story collection
- A book mentioned in Gilmore Girls
- A book over 500 pages
- One word title
- A celebrity book club pick
- Shakespeare retelling or reimagining
- Read a book in a day
- A book that has/will be adapted
- A hyped book
- Named after a song or lyrics
- A gifted book
- A Goodreads Choice Award winner
- A translated work
- Multiple POVs
- Published in 2025
- A library recommendation
Last year I would do monthly wrap ups in my journal where I put the cover of every book I read, but the problem was I didn’t plan these things out ahead of time and when there are months where you read over 20 books it can take a very long time to set it up. Because of that and my schedule, I lost steam after August and didn’t set up the last 4 months of the year. This year I decided to try something new. At the time it was absolutely more laborious and I think this took me like 2 or so hours to complete, but I’m actually so happy with it!
I set up spreads for all of my 2025 reads with boxes so I know exactly where the photos will go and put in my 5 star stickers. I set up spots for all 150 books I’m planning to read this year, which was 5 sets of pages. I also left 1 set of blank pages in case I read more than 150 books. Fingers crossed that I don’t get to more than 198, because that’s the total I have set aside…but I have a plan in place in case I read more than 198!
Surprisingly, the most difficult page for me to set up was my genre tracker. I changed the layout no less than 5 times, and truthfully, I’m not even sure I like how it is now, but we will go with it. I went with 8 genres to track — classics, fantasy, horror, mystery, non-fiction/biography/memoir, plays/musicals, romance, and thriller.
At the beginning of December I posted my Anticipated Reads, so obviously I had to make a spread for it. I wanted to keep this one extra simple to just focus on the books, but I like the simplicity a lot. I didn’t include Holly Jackson’s next book, Not Quite Dead Yet since the official cover hasn’t been released, so I’ll put that in once it comes out.
I love stats, so I had to include a reading stats spread! This one was a lot of fun to put together, and just like any other it was fairly time consuming, especially doing the alternating colors for each row. The stats that I’m tracking here each month will be the number of books read, physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, mixed format, ARCs, books from my physical TBR, new to me reads, rereads, 5 star reads and my monthly average rating. My digital tracker is a lot more detailed than this, but I thought these would be the most important to track in my journal.
Ever since I started a reading journal I’ve had a spread dedicated to tracking what days I read. I love coloring in the little boxes each day, and it’s really cool to look at the spread at the end of the year and see how many days I read vs. how many I didn’t. I decided to add another spread to track the days that I finish a book. I used to put a dot or something on the days read spread when I finished a book, but I’ll be so real, I didn’t think it was as aesthetically pleasing, so now it has its own spread. And yes, it took as long to set up as you imagine it would.
One of the Discord servers that I’m in has a book club, and it’s been so fun reading with them over the last 15 months. I wanted to set up a spread to keep track of each book we choose and my ratings — I didn’t read every book last year, but as I said earlier, one of my goals for the year is to go outside of my comfort zone, so I want to challenge myself to read every book even if it’s not one I’d usually pick up. Our first read of the year is Funny Story by Emily Henry and I’m so excited to reread it and annotate this time.
I love doing the a to z reading challenge each year, even if I can’t complete it (some of those letters are really hard/near impossible), and I’m really happy with how this spread turned out. This way it’ll also be really easy to keep track of which letters I haven’t completed yet.
This year I’m so excited to finally participate in Kayla’s Buzzwordathon this year, and that she’s got two challenges happening this year. She’s got the regular word challenge and a cover challenge this year, and I decided to do a dutch door spread so that I could see both spreads at the same time and I’m really happy with it.
I decided to do the 25 in 25 challenge this year, so of course, I needed a spread for it in my journal. I’ll be sharing a post later this month that goes into the books I picked and how I’ve decided to categorize my choices, but these are 25 books that I’m planning on reading this year.
Usually it’s too hard for me to pick a favorite book of each month (which is then why it’s always hard to pick my favorites of the year), so I decided to set up a favorite book of the month spread. I wanted to keep it simple to be able to focus on the books themselves once they’re all laid out.
Those are all of my yearly spreads! I have some other spreads that I didn’t show here, like my 25 in 25, winter quarter title page, winter bingo and Winterween spreads, but I have blog posts about my 25 in 25 and Winterween TBR coming up, so I didn’t want to share those just yet.
I’d love to know if you have a reading journal (physical or digital!) and what kind of things you track and would love to see photos if you have any!
Until next time! 💜
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