In September 2011, I made an awful discovery. My tweets were gone. The extent to which I was horrified by this was….well, horrifying.

You see, I was trying to recall the book that I had read before Sarah Winman’s When God Was a Rabbit. There was a quote about being a parent in this mystery book that I suddenly wanted. Why I didn’t highlight it, fold the page or tweet the quote at the time is beyond me. I remembered it was halfway down the page, on the left hand side and at the end of a chapter. But I couldn’t remember the book. Nevermind, I thought, I’ll just check out my old friend Twitter.

Twitter is (was) my reading journal. Sometimes I simply list title and author. Sometimes I share my thoughts (in 140 characters). Sometimes I add links to author interviews or reviews. Either way, I always include ‘#reading’. So I was fairly (majorly) disappointed to discover that Twitter had archived my tweets that are more than a few weeks old. I spent a frantic morning on programs like Twimemachine trying to retrieve them but there were gaps (including the mystery book tweets).

So here I am, creating a reading journal that is somewhat more comprehensive than Twitter. Maybe. I might still only list title and author for some books. Or I might come up with a natty rating system. Maybe.