{"id":2214553,"date":"2025-12-28T12:31:25","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T12:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2214553"},"modified":"2025-12-28T12:31:25","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T12:31:25","slug":"the-value-of-keeping-a-reading-journal-entertainment-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/the-value-of-keeping-a-reading-journal-entertainment-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Value of Keeping a Reading Journal | Entertainment\/Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As many of us try to decide on New Year\u2019s resolutions, mine has dropped in my lap.<\/p>\n

For the coming year, I\u2019m going to try recording every book I read. The idea was prompted by my two recent columns about Louisiana readers who have found value in these kinds of reading journals.<\/p>\n

In September, I wrote about Linda Lightfoot<\/a>, a retired newspaper editor who since 2005 has kept a list of books she\u2019s read. Lightfoot, my friend and former boss, told me she wasn\u2019t keeping her reading journal to learn more about herself. She reads a good bit, and the journal is a way to remind her of books already read\u00a0\u2014 and perhaps not worth reading again. But Lightfoot, now 84, said that keeping a reading journal has yielded an insight.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe thing that strikes me,\u201d she told me, \u201cis that even though I\u2019m old, I still like to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n

I also wrote recently about Tricia Day, whose mother, Kitty, kept a reading journal from 1937 until her death in 2007.<\/p>\n

\u201cInspired by my mother\u2019s journal, I started my own list in 1979,\u201d Day told me. \u201cI recorded my books by author and title, so that I could easily check to see if I had read something if I could only remember the author or the title. What I should have recorded were the picture books I read to my three children, as often those were the only books I read for months at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Talking with these Louisiana readers made me think about \u201cMy Life With Bob,\u201d Pamela Paul\u2019s 2017 book about a reading journal she started in high school.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBob\u201d is an acronym for Paul\u2019s \u201cBook of Books,\u201d which she describes as \u201ca bound record of everything I\u2019ve read or didn\u2019t quite finish reading since the summer of 1988.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paul\u2019s reading life has been especially noteworthy. She edited The New York Times Book Review and was a columnist for the paper before moving to The Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know where I\u2019d be without Bob and where I\u2019d have been if he hadn\u2019t been there,\u201d Paul writes. \u201cBob may be a record of other people\u2019s stories, but he\u2019s mine. If there\u2019s any book that tells me my own story, it\u2019s this one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paul\u2019s comments reminded me of David McCullough, the popular biographer who argued that people are what they read. To research his biography of John Adams, McCullough immersed himself in Adams\u2019 favorite books. Scanning McCullough\u2019s list of his own personal favorites in \u201cHistory Matters,\u201d a posthumous collection of the author\u2019s writings that came out this year, I got a better sense of how McCullough thought and worked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Will keeping a reading journal teach me anything about myself? I\u2019m not sure, and I\u2019m equally uncertain whether I\u2019ll have the discipline to keep up a record of what I read.<\/p>\n

But let me start, and I\u2019ll tell you how things turn out.<\/p>\n

Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As many of us try to decide on New Year\u2019s resolutions, mine has dropped in my lap. For the coming year, I\u2019m going to try recording every book I read. The idea was prompted by my two recent columns about Louisiana readers who have found value in these kinds of reading journals. In September, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2214554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2214553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/The-Value-of-Keeping-a-Reading-Journal-EntertainmentLife.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2214553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2214555,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214553\/revisions\/2214555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2214554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2214553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2214553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2214553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}