A 2025 Book Log for the Data Geeks

a resurrected past practice and a template for YOU!

Hello readers! Today brings you a special Wednesday New Year’s Day newsletter edition with a VIDEO (what?!?!) of my 2025 Book Log and a template so you can be just as geeky as I am!

To the surprise of no one, I spent the majority of my couch time during break reflecting on my year of reading and analyzing my reading trends.

What all of that reflection and analysis showed me was that my decision to stop tracking the microdata about the books I was reading in 2024 led to a lack of diversity in my reading, which tells me I need to change things up for the year ahead.

Based on the slim data I do have (you can see that below if you’re interested!), and going back through all of my titles from the year, I can see that I spent long periods just falling into my next read based on whims and chasing new releases. I didn’t challenge or surprise myself nearly as much as would have satisfied me.

To a point, this was therapeutic and I did read so many wonderful books, but I really don’t feel (outside of the middle grade realm) that I grew much as a reader this year.

What’s a nerdy middle-aged librarian TO DO in such a situation, you may ask?¹

Well, luckily I was in this same spot back in 2018ish, and I created a quite fabulous book log back then that I used in tandem with Goodreads to give me constantly up-to-date analytics on my reading. Why not just tweak that for 2025 and be good to go?

Don’t worry ~ that’s what I did! I’m sharing a video of that today, as well as a template just for you in case you want to try the same system this year.

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