Every reading and every reading matters at the plant, and part of the job is a bound logbook, hardcover, sequential pages, nothing torn out or replaced, because a shift log has to be an honest, unbroken record that someone could pull years later and trust. I’ve filled probably nine or ten of them over eleven years. A while back I bought an identical logbook, same supplier even, and started using it for books and games instead.
I didn’t plan the connection on purpose. I just went to the same office supply site I already had bookmarked for work logs and ordered a second one without thinking too hard about it. Denny was the one who pointed out what I’d done, half laughing, when he saw both books sitting on my kitchen table one night. He wasn’t wrong to laugh. I hadn’t noticed I was treating my hobby with the same instinct for permanent, honest record-keeping that my actual job demands, but once he said it out loud I couldn’t unsee it either.
The format’s simple. Title, date finished, one line, no more than a sentence, and a number one through five. No paragraph, no real review, that all lives here on the site now. The logbook is just the ledger, the thing I can flip back through fast to answer “did I actually like that” without having to reconstruct my feelings from memory, which I’ve learned not to trust after enough years of finding out a sensor reading and my gut instinct don’t always agree. I revised my Social Conquest of Earth entry down half a point about two months after finishing it, once the initial enthusiasm wore off and the middle section’s sag stuck with me more than the strong opening did. The logbook doesn’t erase the original entry. I just add a second line under it with the date of the revision. Same rule as a shift log, you don’t white it out, you annotate it.
I’ve thought about switching to an app more than once, honestly, mostly because a friend keeps telling me how much easier it’d be to search, but there’s something about the physical weight of the thing that an app can’t replicate for me, the way I can feel roughly how many books I read last year just by how thick the pages are getting. It’s not efficient. I know that. A spreadsheet would sort by rating in half a second and mine takes me flipping through actual pages if I want to compare two entries from different years. But, I mean, efficiency was never really the point of it. The point was having something as honest and unbroken as the record I already keep for a living, just aimed at something I do because I want to instead of because the job requires it.