News — Books

Book clubs die of two things. Nobody reads the book, or nobody can find a date. Both are logistics problems dressed up as enthusiasm problems, and both are solvable before the first meeting. Here is the whole thing, from the invitation to the point six months in where you find out whether you have a book club or a monthly dinner. Decide four things before you invite anyone Decision Default that works How often Monthly. Every six weeks if the group reads slowly — more honest than monthly with half the group unfinished. Same day each month Second Tuesday. A...

Most book club question lists are interchangeable and most of them are dead on arrival. "Did you like the main character?" gets a yes, a no, and thirty seconds of silence. The questions that work have one thing in common: they cannot be answered in a word, and they cannot be answered without going back to the book. Everything below is built on that. The five-question spine If you only prepare five questions, prepare these. In this order, they will carry ninety minutes for almost any novel. What is this book actually about, apart from what happens in it? Plot...

There are two reasons to label a book. One is that you lend books and would like them back. The other is that a name in the front of a book is a small pleasure, and in forty years it is a record of who owned it. Both are good reasons. What matters is doing it in a way that does not damage the book, because most of the obvious methods do. The options, compared Method Reversible Cost Best for Adhesive bookplate Rarely, in practice Low A home library; the classic option Blind embosser (no ink) No, but no ink...

A numeric reading goal turns reading into a metric. By August you are picking short books to protect the number, which is the opposite of the point. Bingo fixes that. Instead of "read 52 books" it asks "read something set on an island" — which sends you somewhere you would not have gone, with no penalty for taking three weeks over it. The card Copy this into a notebook or print the page. Free space in the middle, one book per square, and a book only counts for one square even when it fits three. B O O K S...

Reading journals fail in one of two ways. Either the setup is so elaborate that logging a book takes twenty minutes and you stop, or there is no structure at all and it becomes a list of titles you could have got from your library account. What follows is twelve spreads that actually get used, in the order to build them, and a per-book page that takes four minutes. Set up in this order Do not build the whole journal in one sitting. Set up the first three spreads today, add the rest as you find you want them —...

Annotating a book is easy to start and hard to keep useful. Most people highlight for two chapters, run out of a reason to pick one color over another, and end up with a book where half the text is yellow and none of it means anything. A key fixes that. Not because it makes the book prettier, but because it makes your marks readable to you in two years, which is the only test that matters. Start with why you are annotating The right key depends on what you want out of it, and these three are genuinely different...

The hard thing about buying for a reader is that the obvious gift is a book, and the obvious gift is usually wrong. They have a list. They know what is next. A book you picked is a book that sits on the shelf being politely appreciated. What works instead is the small stuff around reading — the things a reader would never spend money on for themselves and uses constantly once they have them. Everything below is under $10. For the reader who tracks what they read 1. A reading log notepad — $7. A tear-off sheet per stretch...

What a reading journal is, how it differs from a reading log, the six things worth writing per book, and a free printable page.

Four free printable reading logs you can use straight from this page, plus what to actually track at each age from pre-readers to adults.

If you're shopping for someone who always has a book going and a stack of "to be read" titles waiting their turn, a few well-chosen stationery pieces can be a genuinely great gift. Here are some of our favorites for the reader in your life who also loves to journal. A mug that says it out loud Our Books Are My Social Life mug and I'd Rather Be Home Finishing Up My TBR Pile mug are perfect for the reader who would genuinely rather stay home with a book than go out. They're a low-effort, high-impact gift that gets used...