On 15 May 2026 I started keeping a complete record of every book and film and album I finished, when I finished it. This is the file. Notes on the format follow; the data starts further down. The intent is small but stubborn: to remember, in order, what I have actually read — not what I think I have read, which is a much longer and more flattering list.
I had tried this once before. The previous attempt failed for the usual reasons — the format drifted, the tool changed, the file moved, the will lapsed. I stopped on a Tuesday in November and could not say afterwards what I had been reading on the Monday. The point of a complete record is that gaps are informative; an incomplete record is just an unreliable one†.
The rules are short on purpose. Each one is a thing I learned the hard way the first time around. They are the smallest set I could get away with; anything more elaborate turned out, on inspection, to be a way of avoiding the writing.
Finishing means finishing. Books I abandoned go in a separate list, with the page I stopped on and why. Abandonment is its own record, and it turns out to be the more useful one — the abandonment file is shorter and angrier and tells me more about my tastes than the finished list does.
Annotations live in the margins of the books themselves; the file gets only the one-sentence note. Keeping the two separate is what keeps the file usable. A note you can write in one sentence is a note you can read in one second a year from now; a paragraph is a thing you skim.
“Gaps are informative; an incomplete record is just an unreliable one.”— the file, line 2
The thing I did not expect: I started finishing more books. Not because I felt watched, but because the record is short. Twelve titles in a year looks meagre on paper; it looks like a thing you could have done differently. I stopped picking up a fourth book before I’d closed the third‡.
The second thing: I started reading more slowly. A finished book that I could not summarise in a sentence was a book I had not really read. After the third time of opening the file at the end of a Sunday and finding nothing useful to write, the reading itself changed.
The current file is in a public folder↗. It updates when I finish a thing, which is usually at the end of the week. There is a printable version⌽for people who like that sort of thing — it sets the page width to a paperback and removes the dates, so the file reads as a list rather than as a log.