Every book I finish and most games I play get a line on a sheet of paper taped to the inside of a kitchen cabinet door, the one above the mugs, and I add to it in actual pen standing at the counter, usually while something’s on the stove. The tape gives out every few months, humidity and the cabinet swinging shut too hard, and I just peel the sheet off and re-tape it rather than starting fresh, so at this point the corners are soft and a little translucent from being handled so much.

People are always a little surprised I don’t use an app for this, given that I work somewhere with a fully digitized catalog system and could not be more comfortable with databases professionally. I’ve tried a couple of the reading-log apps over the years, genuinely tried, and they always fall away within a few weeks, not because they’re bad, some of them are quite good, but because opening an app requires a decision, a small deliberate act of picking up my phone, and the cabinet doesn’t ask that of me. I’m standing right there anyway, waiting for water to boil, and the pen’s already sitting in the utensil drawer two feet away.

There’s also something about seeing the whole list at once, in my own handwriting, that a scrollable app just doesn’t replicate for me. I can see a whole year’s shelf of books and games in one glance, the handwriting itself getting slightly different from entry to entry depending on whether I was rushed or relaxed when I wrote it, and that texture matters to me more than I expected it to when I started doing this. An app would sort it, filter it, probably tell me useful things about my own patterns I can’t currently see. But I think I’d lose the specific pleasure of finding an old entry by accident while looking for a newer one, noticing I gave something two stars three years ago that I’d swear today I loved.

I don’t think this makes me better than anyone with a proper app and a proper backup, it’s just what stuck, the same accidental way most habits stick, not because I chose it deliberately but because it kept working when I wasn’t paying attention to whether it would. The tape will give out again eventually. I’ll peel it off and put up a new strip and keep writing on the same soft, translucent sheet underneath it, because apparently that’s just how I do this now.