What Rachel's Reading

I'm a reader. I'm also a sporadic journal-writer. My life has calmed down enough to the point now where I have been considering starting up again. I'm on vacation right now, and I brought my old reading journal. I started it in 2001, and my last entry was from May of 2004. I just finished a book, and was thinking about my entry, when I realized alot has changed since 2004. Mainly, blogs have changed the way we can record our everyday lives. So I decided to blog about the books I read instead of keeping it in a book for only me to read.

In honor of my old journal, here's the first entry I wrote.

July 16, 2001
This is my book journal. I am starting this for a variety of reasons, but the main one is I am a sucker for blank journals. Empty pages are among the many things I cannot seem to resist.
This will also serve to be a diary of my spare time. I don't seem to have much of it, so I want to remember my leisurely moments, both how I spent them as well as the fact that I did, indeed, have some.
But these are not the main reasons why I am writing this. Dad gave me a very interesting quote once, which I think was by Charlie "Tremendous" Jones. Roughly paraphrased, it is this: Ten years from now, the only things that will have changed you are the people you have met and the books you have read. I want to keep a record of the things that have influenced me as a person.
Why do I have this desire? Maybe it goes back to the Puritans' love of journaling as a means of discovering more about themselves and God. Or, maybe it is something else entirely, which I will someday discover in one of the books I will read...