How are you doing, book lovers? I hope you had a merry Christmas! A few weeks ago, I announced that the signups were now open for the 2021 Reading With Muffy Reading Challenge. I am glad that you enjoyed all the diverse prompts and our Goodreads group is buzzing with book recommendations for each of the prompts.
While I love tracking my reading progress on Goodreads, I am a pen and paper person. At the beginning of every year, I invest in a planner, and this year too, it was no different. However, I also decided to include a few additional pages where I can track the books that I read. I kinda loved the templates I made and hence thought you may like it too.
5 Free Reading Tracker Templates
Here’s what you’ll get:
- Reading List
- Book Review Template
- Daily Reading Tracker
- To Be Read List
- Favorite Characters Log List
How to Track Your Reading
- I’ve used Goodreads to track my reading since 2011 and I’ve always loved using it. The best thing about Goodreads is sorting the books into three default shelves- Read, Currently Reading, and Want to Read. It is integrated with Kindle (app and device) and once you finish the book, we can write the review and give a rating as well.
- Maintaining a Spreadsheet was one of my favorite ways of tracking my reading till last year. It could be easily customized according to one’s own needs.
- A Reading Journal is what you need if you prefer the good old-fashioned pen and paper. But the sad part is there are not many dedicated reading journals available and you may have to rely on creating one by yourself – BuJo or other.
- Bookstagram is another popular way of tracking your reads. It is one of my absolute favorites- photographing books, trying to maintain a theme, share beautiful covers, bookshelves, themed collections, book spines, stacks, and more.
I like to write down a bit more than reviews and rely mostly on free templates. For example, I may want to cloak up all my reading challenge progress, favorite characters and what I liked about them, memorable quotes, pending reviews on various book review platforms like Netgalley, and so on and so forth. It helps me record my thoughts in a more organized way.
How to Use Reading Trackers
I’ve created 5 reading tracker templates and they are absolutely free. These can be downloaded, printed out, and filled in to track your reading.
- Reading List: The reading list template is specially designed to track your reading challenges. A specific column dedicated to reading challenge prompts makes it easier for you to cloak your book choices for each prompt in a reading challenge.
I decided to omit the prompts for Reading With Muffy as I wanted to keep this tracker generic. Also, you may want to read more than one book per prompt, and keeping the tracker blank makes it more personalized. - Book Review: The book review template helps you to keep track of the book, author, number of pages, genre, start and end date of your reading, and also the plot, review, and rating.
- Daily Reading Tracker: The daily reading tracker helps you log in the number of minutes you read per day. You may use it as a mood tracker too. Go wild with your ideas!
- To Be Read List: The To Be Read list is my favorite. Designed like a bookshelf, I would use it to write down the name of books that are on my immediate TBR. I may also use it as a TBR list for Reading With Muffy.
- Favorite Characters Log: I have kept the favorite characters tracker simple to cloak some characters that I admire or love during the course of my reading journey in 2021.
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That’s all for now!
I hope you like the templates and make use of it to track your reading goals in 2021!
See you soon!
I really regret not having done any of these, including at least keeping track via good reads. Over the years, I’ve read thousands of books I assume and now don’t even Rememebr which I liked and for what… This should be inculcated as a habit to the younger generation at an early age.
Thank you, Roshan. I used to “only” read in my teen years. But ever since I started blogging and bookstagram I started tracking my reading progress. It gives an instant high seeing how far I have come. 🙂
Wow Shalini, you are simply awesome. I would have loved to see your tracker images as well. Coming to your blog always gives me book love in a new way.
This is another great idea I am going to do in the new year.
Thank you, Geethica. Sure, there is already a sneakpeek of the trackers here. 🙂
Thanks for sharing these! I’m just starting to get into Goodreads – guess I’m years behind you. 😉 But I like how it integrates with the Kindle, and reading more and more on the Kindle, it makes it seamless. I think what’s going to work for me, when it comes to pen and paper, is an integrated journal. Just one. I can barely keep up with one, so I’m keeping my journaling plans small for 2021 – more along the lines of “write something, anything and everything, consistently, in it.” I’ve even signed up for a class a friend is teaching.
Holly Jahangiri recently posted…So Tolls the Bell on 2020
Yes, Holly. Working with Goodreads is a seamless process, especially when you use Kindle a lot. And I totally agree about having an integrated journal. However, not many journals have book-specific pages and hence such trackers become useful. I usually print these out and stick them to my main planner. 🙂
This is lovely, Shalini. Waiting for the downloads and also looking forward to your lovely newsletter! ♥
This is so helpful. Can’t wait to check them out. I read 19 books for your 2020 Challenge, but I didn’t review or participate actively in it. I hope to do so this year.