I spend my working hours inside spreadsheets, ridership counts, on time performance percentages, stop level boarding data broken down by hour, and I am good at it, and I like it, genuinely, there’s a real satisfaction in a clean pivot table that answers a question a councilmember’s been asking for months. So it confuses people, reasonably, that my own reading log is a spiral notebook I’ve been keeping since before I moved to Sacramento, title, date started, date finished, one line of notes, nothing digital, no app, no spreadsheet of my own making even though building one would take me maybe twenty minutes.

I’ve tried the apps. Three different ones, over three different years, each time with real intention to switch over permanently. Every single time I stop within a couple months, not because the app failed technically, they all worked fine, but because something about typing a rating into a form field turns the whole activity into exactly the kind of task I already do for eight hours a day, and I don’t want my reading life to feel like a second shift of data entry. The notebook doesn’t do that. The notebook is slower, and worse at cross referencing, and I have definitely bought a book twice because I forgot I’d already logged it three years back in a different section, and I still prefer it.

Part of it, I think, is what happens when I flip back through old entries by accident looking for something recent. I land on a book from four years ago and there’s a specific phrase I jotted next to the title, sometimes just a word, sometimes a whole margin’s worth of handwriting that’s noticeably messier than my normal handwriting because I was clearly writing it fast, right after finishing, still half inside the book. An app entry doesn’t hold that. A rating field holds a number. The notebook holds the version of me who read it, slightly different handwriting depending on whether I was tired, whether I was on the bus, whether I finished it at two in the morning because I couldn’t put it down.

I know the counterargument, because I’d make it myself about literally anything at work: the data’s more useful if it’s structured, searchable, exportable, and a paper notebook is none of those things. I can’t run a query against it. If I want to know how many five star ratings I gave in a given year I have to count by hand, which took me forty minutes once and I never did it again. That’s a real cost. I’m not pretending it isn’t.

But there’s exactly one thing I want from this particular record that a spreadsheet has never given me anywhere else in my life, and that’s a place where the mess is the point, where slightly worse handwriting on a rushed night means something instead of getting cleaned up into a uniform font. I get structured data all day. This is the one column I keep entirely for myself, unstructured, a little unreadable in spots, and I’m not giving it up for something more efficient.