Reading Log Maker

One line per book

The format is Title | Author | Total pages | Pages read | Start date. Only the title and the total page count are needed; everything after that adds detail as you fill it in. Leave the author out and the table just shows a title. Leave the pages read out and it counts as zero, which is the right answer for a book that is on the pile but not open yet. Leave the start date out and you still get progress, but no finish date, because there is nothing to measure a pace against.

Dates read as 08/27/2026 or 2026-08-27. Impossible dates are rejected rather than silently rolled forward, so a typo like 02/30 shows up as a skipped line instead of quietly becoming March 2nd. Columns can be split with tabs instead of bars, so a spreadsheet block pastes in. A line with letters where the page count should be gets skipped and listed underneath.

If the pages read come out higher than the total, the entry is capped at 100% and flagged. That almost always means the total was mistyped or the page count included an index that the reading did not.

What the finish date actually is

It is one division and one multiplication. Pages read divided by the number of days since you started gives a pace in pages per day. Pages left divided by that pace gives the days remaining. Add those to today and that is the date printed.

The assumption buried in it is that the pace you have kept so far is the pace you will keep. In practice most reading is lumpy: fifty pages on a Sunday, nothing for eleven days, then a chapter on a plane. Every one of those dead days is in the denominator, so a book you put down for a month shows a slower pace than the one you read at when you are actually reading it. The reverse happens too — start something yesterday, get sixty pages in, and the tool cheerfully projects you finishing a nine-hundred-page book in a fortnight.

So read the date as a gauge of the pace you have kept, not as a plan. Anything that works out to more than ten years is not shown at all, because at that point the number has stopped saying anything. If you want a truer figure for a book you abandoned and came back to, set its start date to the day you picked it up again and enter only the pages read since.

Why the monthly table groups by start

Each book lands in the month its start date falls in — not the month it was finished. There is no finish-date column to group by, and adding one would mean recording a date for every book you ever completed, which is more bookkeeping than this is worth. So a book begun in July and finished in August sits in the July row and counts in that row's finished column.

That makes the table answer a specific question: in a given month, how many books did you open, and how many of those have you since finished. It is a decent read on whether you start more than you complete, which is the usual failure mode. Books without a start date collect in their own row at the end.

The printed sheet

The print version carries the titles, authors, page counts and percentages already worked out, and leaves two columns blank: five empty stars, and a wide cell for a line about the book. That split is deliberate. Progress is arithmetic and belongs to the machine; what you thought of a book is something you write once, by hand, after you have closed it. The blank rows at the bottom — up to thirty of them — are for whatever you pick up next, filled in as you go.

Print at 100% scale rather than Fit, or the row heights collapse and there is nowhere to write. Letter is the default; A4 is in the paper dropdown.

Nothing here is kept

The list is read, sorted and printed entirely inside this browser tab. It is not uploaded, not logged, and not saved for next time — reload and the defaults come back. To carry a log forward, use the copy-as-text output and keep it in a note; the book list comes back out in exactly the format the box reads in, so next time you paste it, bump the page numbers, and carry on.

Questions people ask