Priya, who I sit two desks from, has an app that does everything mine doesn’t, it tells her what percentage of the year’s reading was written by women, it graphs her pace against last year, it will apparently recommend her next book based on some algorithm neither of us fully understands, and every time she shows it to me she asks, not unkindly, why I’m still doing this in a notebook that’s started to swell slightly at the spine from a coffee spill in maybe year three.

The honest answer is that the friction is the point. When I finish a book I have to physically sit down, open the notebook, and write a few sentences about it, not a star rating, not a tag, actual sentences, what worked, what I’d tell a friend, sometimes just a complaint about the ending if that’s all I’ve got in me that night. An app would let me log a book in four taps and move on, and I think I’d remember maybe half of what I read as clearly as I do now if that’s all logging it cost me. The friction is doing work.

There’s also just the fact that I can flip back through five years of my own handwriting and watch my taste actually move, which entries got longer when a book really got its hooks into me, which ones are two clipped sentences because I clearly didn’t want to spend more time on it than I had to. I reread my own margin notes on Ventus from a few years back before writing the review that’s up on here now, and past-me had noticed something about the posthuman characters that present-me had entirely forgotten, which is its own small argument for why this system works for me even if it wouldn’t work for everyone.

I’m not precious about this, if the notebook falls apart I’ll get another one, and I don’t think anyone using an app is doing it wrong. But there’s something in the slowness that matches how I actually want to relate to a book, a little effort spent on the way out the door, and I’d rather keep that than get a pie chart of my genres for the year.

Priya did eventually talk me into trying her app for a month, as an experiment, and I kept up both systems side by side just to see what each one actually captured that the other didn’t. The app was genuinely better at some things I hadn’t considered, it caught patterns across dozens of books at once that my notebook simply can’t surface, how my pace changes by season, which genres cluster together in a given year. But every time I opened it to log something, the whole interaction took maybe six seconds, and I noticed within about a week that I was already forgetting details about books I’d logged that way, in a way I never do with the notebook entries.

I dropped the app after the month was up, not because it failed at what it does, it clearly does that well, but because it turned out I wasn’t actually trying to solve the problem it solves. I don’t need to know my pace by season. I need to remember what a book actually did to me while I was reading it, and it turns out the six extra seconds of typing that out by hand is the whole mechanism, not an inconvenience standing between me and a cleaner system.