Using Goodreads
I’m a big fan of data, and that includes the books that I read or listen to. However, the means by which I have recorded what books I consume has shifted over the past few months.
I started with a spreadsheet on my Google Drive. The main pieces of information I wanted to maintain were the book, the order, and the reading dates. In addition to books that I had already finished, I kept a few rows without order or date to indicate books that I wanted to read.
This solution worked perfectly fine for my needs. However, I started gradually folding in Goodreads for some additional functionality that it offers. Notably, it has a social element where you can see what your peers are reading, what they’ve rated books, and even promotes reading challenges where you commit to a certain number of books for the year.
For a while I used both methods concurrent. It wasn’t really much effort to add books to either, and they both had their own benefits. Eventually, though, I started using my spreadsheet less and Goodreads more. Drive is occasionally blocked at work, so I wasn’t always able to access my spreadsheet. I could have updated the log from my phone, or my laptop at home, but I would often forget before I got around to it. Goodreads has never been blocked to the best of my knowledge, so it was just more convenient for me to go on there and track books.
More recently, my conversion to Goodreads was made almost complete because of the reading challenges. Turns out, you can mark a book as read without indicating that you have finished it. I don’t really know the exact details, but it seems as though you have to mark a book as currently reading, and then indicate that you finished before Goodreads will incorporate your yearly summary. I wasn’t aware of this until I looked at my profile for 2019 and noticed that several books appeared to be missing. When I compared the books I expected to be on there with the list that was actually indicated, I noticed that only the most recent books were included. Specifically, these were the books that I listed as currently reading and marked them as done from that list.
I started with a spreadsheet on my Google Drive. The main pieces of information I wanted to maintain were the book, the order, and the reading dates. In addition to books that I had already finished, I kept a few rows without order or date to indicate books that I wanted to read.
This solution worked perfectly fine for my needs. However, I started gradually folding in Goodreads for some additional functionality that it offers. Notably, it has a social element where you can see what your peers are reading, what they’ve rated books, and even promotes reading challenges where you commit to a certain number of books for the year.
For a while I used both methods concurrent. It wasn’t really much effort to add books to either, and they both had their own benefits. Eventually, though, I started using my spreadsheet less and Goodreads more. Drive is occasionally blocked at work, so I wasn’t always able to access my spreadsheet. I could have updated the log from my phone, or my laptop at home, but I would often forget before I got around to it. Goodreads has never been blocked to the best of my knowledge, so it was just more convenient for me to go on there and track books.
More recently, my conversion to Goodreads was made almost complete because of the reading challenges. Turns out, you can mark a book as read without indicating that you have finished it. I don’t really know the exact details, but it seems as though you have to mark a book as currently reading, and then indicate that you finished before Goodreads will incorporate your yearly summary. I wasn’t aware of this until I looked at my profile for 2019 and noticed that several books appeared to be missing. When I compared the books I expected to be on there with the list that was actually indicated, I noticed that only the most recent books were included. Specifically, these were the books that I listed as currently reading and marked them as done from that list.
When I decided to participate in the 2020 reading challenge, I figured I may as well shift fully to Goodreads. If I’m going to finish 50 books this year, I need all of them to count toward my total. If you’re curious what all I’ve read this year, you can see that as well. I promise, this should be pretty accurate compared to 2019.
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