Hello!
Ah, the new year! I’m still surprised we’re a part of a new year. Am I the only one who feels like this?
I am excited to talk about my 2026 Reading Journal and share everything I’ve been doing so far! By the time you’re reading this, I would hope to have gotten my stuff done for the second quarter, but for now, this post will be my process over the overall theme and then the spreads I’ve made for the first half of the year.
I try to change my theme every year and for 2026, and I decided to pick a similar aesthetic to last year, as I’ve chosen the five women’s stories featured in the Ladies of Devon series. I read Kasey Stockton’s books last spring and immediately fell in love with them. So, my idea for 2026 is to dedicate each of the four quarters to the main four girls, Giulia, Mabel, Amelia and Hattie. However, the series itself has five books, and Mabel’s little sister we get to know in the second book, Pippa, will be included in my second quarter plans.
In November, I started to create a sort of vision board of sorts of the things I wanted to bring out in my journal for each woman/couple’s stories.
Giulia has a fascination with these lemon tarts she has at tea and I’ve definitely let that steer me into using lemons everywhere in my journal. However, the cover of the books is full of a dark green and I really loved that and knew that I could definitely work with that as a main color, and I realized I had two color combination that matched each story fairly early on while reading the books. I didn’t know what I was going to do with that information at first, but once as the year drew to a close, I ultimately decided to use all of the things I’d gathered from the books, my Pinterest board, etc. and use it for my reading journals.
As far as set up goes, I’ve kind of kept everything the same as I’ve done in last year’s spreads. I find nothing wrong with a couple of them, and I like to keep them going, adjusting them here and there but for the most part everything is the same.
The Troubled Opening
I have decided to do two A5 lined journals by Papergate on Amazon. They’re cheap and the paper is thick enough that none of my marker’s bleed through the pages. I still wish they sold their sticker labels you always get as a secret gift in the back pocket because they’ve become my monthly stats boxes. Even if you purchase their travel or pocket journals, they also have the boxes in a smaller size and unfortunately, I didn’t know they were smaller until I was busy creating my Stats pages… that was a bit of bummer on my part, but I’ll learn to live with it.
The first thing I did when it arrived was of course clear out the back pocket space but fix the first two pages. If you’re part of the journaling community, you know the annoying two pages at the start that are awkward and will not stay open, so I went at that section quickly and it almost discouraged me as the pages did NOT want to work with me nor did they like the tape I used so I had to rip them out and start over.
In my way of recreating my opening page, I used my new stickers that are these little washi pictures of random things and picked four that represented the characters and put them at the spine as I had damaged it in my haste, but I also added a border to each one with their colors; afterwards I stamped the first page with my name and the year. I also thought it needed a little bit of Pippa, so I added some bubbles and sea creatures here and there.
Floating Shelves and The Box Garden
When I moved onto the next layout, I had even more trouble getting my first row of floating shelves and then glued those pages together and I decided to do something completely different. Instead of putting the shelves together, I thought it would be cool to separate them, so I have my first three shelves that hold 35 empty spaces on the left side, I did one part of my Reading Tracker or as I’m calling it this year, “The Box Garden” on the next page. As you turn the page, the process is repeated again. The next part of The Box Garden and three more shelves rounding out the 66 books of the year. As I learned last year, I will be happy to get through as many books as I can in the next nine months.
For someone who doesn’t enjoy the color pink nor the whole minimalist trend either, these are probably my favorite pages. I think it showcases the girly and old-timey vibes of the Regency era.
Stats Page & Alphabet Challenge
Next up is my statistics section. This is my first spread dedicated to Giulia and Nick’s story with the amount of green and lemons. I wasn’t successful at finding any lemon tart stickers or paper, but I was able to an easy sticker book full of citrus fruit, but mainly lemons. There are a few odd things associated with the summertime included, but it’s been a great addition to my growing collection.
This layout is made for the first half of the year. Since I have the second notebook, I will do it over to highlight either Amelia or Hattie. This is where those little label boxes that is included with your purchased notebooks, comes in handy, but as I was writing everything on them, I realized I kept “Bingo” on the lower right corner. What I forgot were my reading challenges. I’m doing two this year, for now. You already know about the 26 in 2026 challenge. It’s been a fun way to get through multiple books at a time, especially when it comes to 13 series. By the time this post comes out, I will (hopefully) be done with three separate book series: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare and The Folk in the Air by Holly Black.
The other is my Alphabet Challenge. I knew this would be a HUGE undertaking, but I feel ready to attempt this. My only irritation is that I wish I hadn’t used up six pages. I tried to make enough room for each letter, but also the book covers I plan on sticking on at the end of the year. At the moment, the letters I’ve used have their titles, so I don’t forget–depending on how many letters I take out in a month, I’m trying to include the letters on the labels. This spread is dedicated to Mabel and Pippa, as it’s purple and blue. I even used a Dutch door design and added some of my three-inch washi tape images as decoration, which you’ll understand more in the next quarter.
Once I was finished with everything, I took photos back in late December. I didn’t have any letter stickers in my collection before, and then I found a nice booklet of letters that matched the colors of both quarters, and I was able to finally give these spaces a nice flair; not that the boats and ocean photos were boring.
Here’s the interesting part though, I didn’t have enough room for “Y” or “Z” and I panicked as I glued the final Dutch door flap, so I went looking on Instagram and YouTube, and found something called a “tip in” and I really love how educational JashhiCorin’s channel is for any journal person (what do we call ourselves?) and attempted it.
Do you remember when I talked about the smaller label boxes in the beginning? Well, before I bought my notebooks I thought I found a great deal on a three-notebook deal on Amazon, only to find out that they are travel sized. It wasn’t a bad thing though, as I am using the smaller box labels located in the back pocket of each notebook. I gave the yellow and pink to Nolan and Kimber. Unfortunately, Nolan lost his and Kimber is obsessed with her little pink book. She even steals my pink pen and has some of my pink flower stickers on the outside. Anyways, after realizing my overall mistake, I thought about the little notebook and tested it out if I could add the final letters with a single sheet. I used my knife to cut it out and took my skinnier double-sided tape to make my little tip in flap.
The Dutch Door Calendars Are Back!
It might seem like a hard thing to do, but I recommend everyone doing at least one Dutch door design in their journals. I find them to be helpful, especially for things such as calendars. I use it in my journals since last summer, I think. It’s definitely a spread I need an extra set of hands–so I borrow my mom and she does the cutting process at the end.
Since I use an A5 Lined journal, I am able to give you some measurements, but to be honest I don’t really measure anything out. I’m not great at getting things straight anyways, so I just wing it and go about my day.
However, with this I count out four lines from both the top and bottom parts of each page, as the spaces between them will be where you place your calendars. I use construction paper in mine, and this is actually the part I hate the most because it doesn’t matter how many times I check ahead, I will still mess up the dates and so I end up having to do it over again; like with this photo. I didn’t realize my mistake until I was done that I had switched up the dates. I had to write out the correct days of the week next to the number and oddly enough that made everything better!
First Quarter Beginnings
As far as the monthly pages, I’ve mostly stuck with my regular system. I’ll change up whether I want to use marker or an extra piece of colored paper on the left page that’ll hold my library cards and calendar keys for each month. It is easier to do the markers though as I’ve said before, I rarely get things straight, so I find myself going the other direction the most.
I’ve purchased quite a few sticker books in the past few months and one that has been very beneficial are my letter sticker sheets. I also have my new favorite tool, tweezers. My mom likes to joke that I look like a surgeon doing sutures… I like it as it means I don’t risk stabbing myself with my crafting knife! Although, I will say I have gotten better about that! Anyways, I use my tweezers to pull off the stickers and arrange them across the layout. I’ve lost a few letters since I started but as I continue on this journey, I should become a bit of a pro with them. I don’t know why I continue to put “words” as I don’t collect any words in my books; it’s one thing I lost when I switched to listening audiobooks.
This year, I wanted to do more book reviews in this journal. I allowed myself to do mini reviews last year, but I wasn’t able to really enjoy creating a full spread and I have all of these stickers that won’t fit with the overall theme, so I have some photos to show you what I’ve been reading like all The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins. I’m not just writing about the books listed in my “26 in 2026” challenge, but for this post these pages have become favorites to look at the most.
I got a gift card for Christmas and found only one mini printer that allowed colored pictures in my price range and It’s a HPRT Mini Photo Printer. At the time I wasn’t able to connect it to my phone, but we put it on my mom’s, it wasn’t ideal at first as I thought if I had it, I wouldn’t have to worry about needing her phone for my journal. but we are so fascinated with it. Back in January, I had to get a new phone and one the first things I did with it was hook it up to the printer and it works like a charm, and I can do it all with my feet! After it prints out, I use my cutter board thingy and trim the little white lip at the end and place my double-sided tape to place it in the top left corner of the spread.
All right, well that is it for this post. I hope you have enjoyed reading about all of my mistakes and success in creating my 2026 Reading Journal. I really hope the second quarter post isn’t too long nor takes me an extra month to get out to you either.
Are you keeping a Reading Journal this year? If you are, what is your theme? How are you doing with it so far?
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