Reading Log Timeline

Reading Log Timeline

A private bookshelf laid out in time. The left rail is a vertical axis of months (yyyymm, ascending), and each book is a paper card pinned somewhere in the space beside it — its vertical position fixed to the month it was read, its horizontal position free. Click or tap a card to unfold the reading memo tucked inside; click again (or open another card) to fold it back.

Element	Meaning
Axis label	Year and month in yyyymm order, oldest at the top
Bright tick	A month with at least one book on it
Dotted thread	Ties each card back to its month on the axis
Card	Author and title; the + corner hints it opens
Unfolded card	The imprint line (when given), the reading memo, tags, and the month it was read
Filter chips	Pick a tag to spotlight matching books; everything else fades back
Serial card	A magazine serial, ruled across the top in its colour, set right of the books at the month reading began
Serial thread	A solid line in its own lane at the right edge, with a square node for every issue read

Each book carries tags, shown inside the unfolded card and gathered into the filter bar under the heading — clicking a tag in either place narrows the shelf to that tag (click again for all). Busy months simply stretch: a month with ten books grows taller so its shingled stack never spills into the next one.

Serials run on a strand of their own, down the right-hand side. A novel read issue by issue in a literary monthly is logged once, with the list of issues read. Its card appears only once, beside the month reading began; after that the serial is a thread with a square node in every month an issue was read (a magazine’s January issue is on the stands in December). Pick a node and the whole serial lights up while the same card unfolds right there, pointed at that issue — with a check-in grid of every issue read so far, where a number jumps to that month. The serials filter spotlights just this strand.

One book, one Markdown file. Each entry is a .md file in the _books/ folder beside this page: a few lines of frontmatter — month, author, title, tags, and optionally a free-text publication line — and then the memo, written as ordinary Markdown. Quotations, emphasis, lists, and links are all compiled at build time and set in the card’s own typography.

Nothing about the look is written by hand. A card’s colour comes from the book’s most distinctive tag, so genres keep their own spine colour across the shelf, and its position beside the axis is placed by a golden-ratio walk seeded on the month — spread out, never in a staircase, never touching its neighbour.