I’ve tried an app for this three separate times, and each time it lasted a couple of weeks before I quietly went back to the notebook, a plain spiral one I keep in my bag alongside a badge and a granola bar wrapper I keep meaning to throw out. The notebook has every book I’ve finished since I started the job, one line each usually, sometimes just a date and a title and a number out of five, sometimes a whole paragraph if something actually got to me, and there’s no real consistency to which entries get which treatment, which used to bother me until I stopped caring.

Part of why the app never stuck is timing. I log books at genuinely strange hours, right at shift change usually, four in the morning with a coffee that’s gone cold an hour ago, and there’s something about unlocking a phone and finding the right app and typing on a tiny keyboard that just doesn’t fit the actual moment, whereas the notebook’s already open on the break room table most nights because I’m using it for other things too, a grocery list, a note to myself about a call I need to make. A pen doesn’t ask anything of me the way an app does.

The other part, the part I only really noticed writing this, is that the notebook has become its own small archive of exactly how tired I was on a given night. My handwriting three months into a stretch of six overnight shifts in a row looks nothing like my handwriting after two days off, looser, faster, more likely to trail off mid sentence. I flipped back a few weeks ago looking for when I’d read something and ended up reading my own scrawled entry on Brave New World from a night I clearly did not sleep enough before, half the sentence just falls apart, and I remember exactly which shift that was without the date even helping me.

I know an app would search better, tag better, probably even chart my reading pace in a way I’d pretend not to care about and definitely would. But I think what I actually want out of this record isn’t efficient retrieval, it’s the specific, slightly embarrassing honesty of my own handwriting telling me how the night actually went. There’s a kind of marginalia in just how steady the ink is that a searchable database will never give me back.

So the notebook stays, water stained on one corner from a spilled coffee I still feel bad about, held together now with a rubber band because the spiral’s started to give out. I’ll probably buy a second one before this year’s out. I have already, if I’m honest, started eyeing which one.