The Art of Book Journalling

There are plenty of photos swarming social media of aesthetic looking journals, pretty annotations and lots of cute stationery. I have been guilty of giving in to the craze of pastel highlighters and washi tape. While I love using my unnecessarily overpriced strips of flowered tape, or my collection of beverage stickers, I find that simple methods of journalling often work the best. If you find it hard to stick to keeping a journal, in this case a reading journal, here are my top tips for enjoying the art of book journalling!

The simpler the better

Sometimes we just need to ditch the fun pens and keep things basic. Write out your columns (e.g. title, author, blurb, rating) and go from there...

I find that creating sections works really well to keep myself on track when making notes. The times I have tried to overcomplicate this by putting a section for quotes or character analysis, I've ended up feeling more like I've set myself English Literature homework than a fun, relaxing activity!

Colour schemes

Of course we still want our journals to look nice! Instead of stressing over how aesthetic the pages will look, I love to colour coordinate by genre. I have pink for romcoms, blue for fantasy, yellow for non-fiction, and red for literary fiction. Then I just make the page reflect that colour and it seems to always match!

Prepare in advance

This is quite hard to stick to, and I forget to do this all. the. time. But setting the spread up when you first start the book can really help to encourage yourself to finish it after you have read the book. Just putting in the basic information is a marker that you have started.

Inspo!

I follow so many accounts on Instagram and on Pinterest that share really beautiful journal spreads. There's a whole range of minimalistic ones, as well as bright creative ones, but just seeing other people keep on top of their journals motivates me to stay on top of mine!

Reminders

This may be a bit extreme, but setting a reminder on your phone to do five minutes of journalling every day, or at the end of the week, can really help to remember that journal in the corner of your desk collecting dust.

Journalling is so fun and an amazing way to not only decompress from the day, but also let the creativity flow. Happy journalling!