Hello and welcome to best laid plans. This is your host Sarah Hart Unger and this is a podcast where we talk all things planning and planning adjacent.

Today we are going to talk about a topic near and dear to my heart, which is reading.

We will delve in a little bit into reading habits and how my reading habits have changed over the

years, as well as some tips I've discovered to help me bring more reading into my life.

And then I am going to discuss four reading journals or book journals that are on the market

and we'll compare each of them in case you are looking for a little bit of planner style inspiration

to help you track your reading for this year. All right. So we are kind of nearing that back to

school season and we are exiting out of summer season, but I am still really, really enjoying the tail end of summer reading. I've always really enjoyed reading. As a kid, I was like the kind of kid who would check out 10 library books and my ideal Saturday would be

maybe a gymnastics class and then come home close my door and read like six something like six

series books or like kid books like I didn't necessarily read anything highbrow I truly enjoyed babysitters

club and sleep over friends and sweet valley high and sweet valley twins and like god knows what else

as well as some more elevated classics from judy bloom things like that but i was still reading

what i found fun and i really loved it and it brought a lot

of joy to my life. And even today, I think of some of my favorite characters from those books and

they feel like people who have actually added real dimension to my life or who I've learned from

or have been influenced by. So I've always loved reading. I've always felt very close to reading.

And it's one of my favorite pastimes always felt very close to reading, and it's one of my

favorite pastimes because it's like an escape, but it's also active at the same time. I guess that's

kind of hard to explain, but for those of you who are readers in love reading, you probably feel

similarly. I definitely felt out of the habit of reading as much for fun when I entered college. I went to a liberal art school where there was a lot of reading a sign in any non-science classes. And my science classes took up lots of time. And of course, I was trying to get good grades because I wanted to go to medical school. And so reading for pleasure did not take up a large sum of my time during that period.

But I found books again probably midway through medical school when someone, I don't remember

who honestly, but someone introduced me to Heruki Murakami. And I just started reading all of his

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