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QotW #4: Tracking What You’ve Read
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Kathi, Moderator & Book Lover
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Jul 31, 2022 07:50AM
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Mostly Goodreads, but I've also begun to use StoryGraph as I like the visual representations it gives.
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I tag my books with the year I read them, so anything not tagged with a year is pre-2009.
I track my reading exclusively via Goodreads. However, I am considering starting a reading calendar, as well.
I find that I'm prone to overextending myself with buddy/group reads - often pushing my personal selections to the side in the process.
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1. We have a spreadsheet of all the books we own (paper, ebook, and audiobook) and one of the fields is yes/no for if my husband has read it and another for if I’ve read it.
2. I have another spreadsheet that has pages by year where I track what I’ve read—date I finished it, title, author, rating on a 10 point scale.
3. I use Goodreads. I have a pile of books that say I added them in 2009, which might be when I joined Goodreads, and then others get added as I read them. I mostly use Goodreads to track my upcoming books (which I list as “Currently Reading”) and for the annual Reading Challenge, but I adjust my “currently reading” status to “read” when I’ve finished a book. The only thing I don’t like is that novellas and short stories that Amazon sells as separate books get listed as separate books here in Goodreads and the Challenge records them that ways. For example, I am reading the 5 short stories called “Black Stars” but Amazon/Goodreads will count them as 5 books. In my spreadsheet, I will record them as 1 book of short stories call “Black Stars”.
4. I also use a page in my iOS Notes to track a few other things—books I’m looking to buy, series I may want to try, etc.
Three places for me:1 - an Excel spreadsheet. I make a new one every year and track what I read by week and when I add it. I've been doing this since 2006, and I add to it a bit every year, so I have a LOT of data to work with now. It's really cool to see patterns emerge over time! I also keep track of preorders and my wish list on there.
2 - Here on Goodreads, usually 1-3x/week.
3 - I have a Storygraph account and also love the stats features. I only update it every few months though, because I only have 2 friends on there (1 of whom doesn't actually have any books added!). It also has many of the database limitations of the Goodreads of 10+ years ago, so I'm hopeful that will improve over time.
Hmm, that's a difficult question to answer.In a way yes. I keep track of what I have read to help keep me from falling into reading ruts where I just keep reading the same authors, books, and series over and over.
I make use of the Want To Read shelf as a way for me to keep track of books I am interested in buying.
I make use of the To Read Owned shelf because that's where I move stuff to from the Want to Read shelf when I buy them. Unless I read them relatively quickly, I tend to forget they are there. Once in a long while I tend to go through the shelf and just remove books that have been sitting there for a while. This does not mean I am not interested in the book or don't want to read the book. I honestly use the shelf as a way to trigger notifications in my feed that I have purchased the book. After that, I just don't really care much.
Pretty much every other shelf I have was created to improve the results of the Goodreads recommendation engine.
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Kathi wrote: "I thought I would check out StoryGraph, but it seems to not want to import my Goodreads library. I followed all the steps and it says it’s “working on it and will email me when it’s done” but it’s ..."It's been a bit, but IIRC, mine took a couple of days. Larger collections take longer, but it did eventually work.
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Good to know. Thanks!
