by Nancy M. Henkel

from Ready-Made Book Displays. Libraries Unlimited, 2011.

If you were ever tempted to break the lock on your older sister’s diary and read it, here’s the booklist for you. All of these books are done in diary format, and it seems to be perennially popular with patrons. My all-time favorite (so far) is Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, but I also loved The Adrian Mole Diaries by Sue Townsend when I first read it as a teenager. To find these in your catalog you may want to try search terms such as “diary,” “journal,” and “epistolary.”

Besides fiction titles written as diaries, there is an incredibly large number of published journals written by famous individuals such as Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys, and William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. And don’t forget the most famous journal of all, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.

Prop Ideas

Ornate pens or pencils
Blank sheets of writing paper
Diary pages (written on or blank)

Related Dewey Subject List

Journal writing (808.066)
Journal/bookmaking (686)

Booklist

Douglas Carlton Abrams. The Lost Diary of Don Juan. Atria Books, 2007.
At the urging of his benefactor (and to refute the lies), Juan Tenorio pens a diary and reveals his adventures and his mastery of the art of passion.

Sherman Alexie. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Little, Brown, 2007.
Alexie’s National Book Award–winning story about Junior, who leaves the Spokane Indian reservation to attend a neighboring school and finds that the mascot is the only other Indian.

Sandra Dallas. The Diary of Mattie Spenser. St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997.
A diary found in an attic brings forth the story of a young woman who endures life on the Colorado frontier.

Louise Erdrich. Shadow Tag. Harper, 2010.
A troubled marriage. A man who reads his wife’s diary. A woman who writes a pseudo-diary for her husband to find as well as a real one for herself. Two children caught in the middle.

Jim Fergus. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
After being unfairly committed to an insane asylum by her snobbish family, May agrees to participate in a secret government program designed to “civilize” Native American warriors by marrying them to white women.

Laurie Graham. Gone with the Windsors. HarperCollins, 2006.
A diary written by Wallis Simpson’s wealthy and completely clueless best friend, Maybell, chronicling the divorcee’s pursuit of her prince.

Syrie James. Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë. Avon, 2009.
Here’s the diary of the author of Jane Eyre as she herself might have written it: her secluded, bookish sisters, her drug-addicted brother, and her secret love.

Allen C. Kupfer. The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Forge, 2004.
An English professor discovers diary fragments purportedly belonging to Bram Stoker’s fictional vampire hunter from Dracula, Abraham Van Helsing.

Nancy E. Turner. These Is my Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881–1901. HarperCollins, 1998.
Twenty years in the life of an adventurous woman living in the Arizona Territory. Based on the author’s family memoirs.

Kate Westbrook. The Moneypenny Diaries. Thomas Dunne Books, 2008.
After years of keeping some of Britain’s and James Bond’s most secret secrets, Miss Moneypenny speaks at last.

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