Reading History
Then when I was ten my mother told me that her mother had kept a notebook to record all of the books she read. I wish we still had it. I favour books from the nineteenth and early twentieth century and I would love to know which my grandmother had read too and to be able to look out for “her” books.
Anyway I started my own list and grew and grew. It started in a notebook, progressed into card indexes and eventually it turned into an Access database.
The trouble was though, when I looked back I could immediately relive some books, there were others that I remembered little or nothing of and some that were just titles and authors to me. And so I did two things.
I started this blog, to write about books and fix them more firmly into my memory. It’s grown into more than that, but that’s where it started.
And I let go ditched the database. A long list of books and authors read years ago disappeared and a weight lifted. History didn’t matter, memories and the future did.
Which is not to say that I’m not keeping track. You will see that I have other pages for particular strands of reading and I keep annual lists of books read too.
And here they are:
Fleur in her World 
I started keeping lists of the books I read in 1996. I now am on my third notebook. I list the titles, authors, and dates completed. About three years ago, I also started included the settings of novels. Every so often, I will jot down a quote a book.