Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith

Warning: during the process of this book you will get dirty. You may find yourself covered in paint, or any other number of foreign substances. You will get wet. You may be asked to do things you question. You may grieve for the perfect state that you found the book in. You may begin to see creative destruction everywhere. You may begin to live more recklessly.

I did not know what I was getting into when I first bought this book. Wreck This Journal (WTJ from now on) is a crazy personal experiment that requires you to step very, very far outside your comfort zone and take strange risks. I've gotten weird looks from people when I spent 25 minutes in my local grocery store peeling stickers off fruit and sticking them to pages in my journal (only to realize after that the directions were to take stickers from bought fruit...oops).

To those who have never heard of this book, it's an interactive journal that has a suggestion on each page that should be completed by the owner, a family member, a friend or a stranger...anyone really. You are supposed to bring this everywhere and eventually complete all the pages.

Some are harmless: color this page, add page numbers to the journal, collect stamps from mail you've received. Other pages are more daring: find a way to wear the journal, take the journal for a walk, keep a stain log. Actually quite a few pages require being ripped out to complete the task at hand, for example, tear this page out and play journal golf.

Anyway, before I give away what ALL the pages say, this book has pushed me to my social limits. I am shy by nature and some interactions with people can be downright awkward. I bought this book thinking that it would be fun to do during my off hours but it ended up taking over my life. I purchased the book back in August and only had it for a week before leaving for college so I didn't get many pages done. I had my sister ship it to me almost two weeks ago and now I'm almost done with it.

Not to say that this book won't provide hours of entertainment, it will, I promise! But I happen to have a lot of time on my hands this semester so I turned to WTJ instead of the usual Netflix. I love having a creative outlet so much that I may have to purchase one of the sequels to keep up my insane craftiness.

Here are some of my favorite pages to date:

But overall I give this book 5 stars. It's great for when you need to kill some time or meet some new people or get kicked out of your local grocery store (just kidding! but I was getting a LOT of strange looks)