How I Track My Reading

(and why I don’t use Goodreads)

For the organized or data-oriented reader, it can be an overwhelming challenge to develop a single, optimal system for tracking reading. While many people simply rely on memory to remember what they have read, others create systems to remember what we read, how we read, and how we felt while we were reading. Creating a tracking system is helpful in determining patterns in what we read and like and can help us document our experiences of reading. 

For many, the go-to tool for tracking reading is Goodreads. I personally haven’t found that Goodreads meets my wants for a tracking system, so I’ve created my own method (with the technological help of my sister!). As I describe my own method, which you might be able to use or adapt yourself, I wanted to simultaneously express why I choose not to use certain popular tracking methods, like a 5-star rating system or Goodreads (and other social media-esque tracking methods). So, together, here is how I track my reading and why I track it this way.

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Spreadsheet over Social Platform.

Personally, I have chosen to create a personal spreadsheet, which my sister helped me make on Airtable, rather than a social or external facing platform like Goodreads.

The main reason for this is that Goodreads emphasizes the community pressures of reading— I’m always seeing what other people are reading, how they are reviewing books, and what their metrics look like. When I want to reflect on my reading process, I want to do so without other people in mind. I don’t want to write notes on books that I read that force me to defend my opinions on a book or feel swayed by other people’s opinions.  

Broadly, I find that my own tastes are often quite different from Goodreads general opinions, and while I can appreciate reading positive and critical reviews of books, I prefer to read reviews from bloggers or columnists I trust rather than the extreme or inflammatory ones at the tops of Goodreads pages. 

Because I want to center my personal reading experience without any social or external pressures, I use a spreadsheet instead.

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Structure of Spreadsheet.

Firstly, my spreadsheet includes the obvious categories of Title, Author, and Translator for basic documentation purposes. Additionally, I include the following categories so I can track various statistics and trends in my reading: 

• Form: designating novel vs. essay collection vs. non-fiction etc.
• Genre 
• Year Published
• Year Read
• Author Gender : I use this to track statistics of how many male / female / non binary authors I read every year so I can make sure I’m diversifying my reading
• Country of Novel: I like to keep track of where the author is from and/or where the novel is set to make sure I am reading widely
• Publishing Company

These categories allow me to widely collect data on my reading, frequently quantitatively. However, I don’t find that purely quantitative statistics accurately represent my reading experience. For this reason, I have also included a “notes” section and “favorites” designation, detailed below. 

Favorites

When designating my favorites, I prefer not to use a 5 star or 10 star rating system because I can’t find a meaningful way to assign values to my feelings for a book. This is for a couple of reasons: 

• I read a lot of great literature for my courses at school that I can acknowledge to be great, but isn’t personally a favorite. For example, through studying Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I appreciate why the novel has gained the reputation and success it has, but I personally don’t consider it a favorite. If the novel is, in my opinion, perfectly crafted, doesn’t it deserve a top rating? But if it’s not a personal favorite or memorable on a personal level due to theme and subject matter, can it merit the full 5 stars? 

• I also struggle ranking books I love— for example, Anna Karenina and War and Peace are two of my favorite novels, though I love Anna Karenina more. Does this mean I must give War and Peace a lower rating than Anna Karenina? I don’t think War and Peace deserves less than 5 stars, yet now I have two 5 star novels that are not equal in their rating. Further, how would a 5 star essay collection rank against a 5 star classic? I find this difficult to distinguish and thus the numbers seem quite arbitrary. 

• I never have a singular relationship with novels. Novels I read when I was a newer reader in 2014 would be more highly rated than if I had read them now, as a more critical reader. Does that mean I should retroactively change previous ratings, despite having a truly positive experience when I initially rated them?

Ultimately, I’ve developed a more organic and fluid “favorite” designation below that avoids this trouble with rating. If I have enjoyed or connected to a book in a way that I would personally call it to be my favorite, I give it a single star. Currently, in my spreadsheet, there are around 50 books with this designation. This way, there is a simpler separation on my spreadsheet— books that are my favorite, and books that are not, and there is no ranking within these various categories. Books fluidly move back and forth between the two categories depending on my relationship with those books at the moment. 

On occasion (in the case of 4 books— Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) I have designated books with two stars. These are the books I would consider my absolute favorite, or simply needing an extra layer of acknowledgement, and while this second star is also somewhat arbitrary, it feels intuitive to me which books to place in this category. 

Notes

Designating books as “favorite,” ”not-favorite,” or “double favorite” doesn’t really give me much information beyond broad, intuitive categories. For this reason, I leave an extensive set of notes for each book. As mentioned above, I don’t like “reviewing” these books for anyone other than myself in the spreadsheet, so I keep the notes quote personal and reflective to my own reading experience. This allows me to designate what I like and dislike about a book without having to rate it quantitatively, and provides me reminders if I want revisit books or recommend them to someone else. 

My notes take many forms, but they usually include some of the following: 

• Why I picked up this book or was interested in it initially (did I read it for class, was it gifted to me?)
• My feeling towards the book while I was reading (did I initially like it, was it slow to get into, did I put it down then pick it up weeks later?)
• My feelings at the end of the book and why 
• Stories related to the reading experience (did someone on the bus stop and tell me they loved this book? did I read this book with a friend?)
• Favorite characters and why
• Memorable scenes and why
• Themes that were interesting to me 
• Questions I was left with, what I didn’t understand
• What I wish the author had done differently
• What I can learn from this book as a writer
• What I can learn from this book as a person
• Who I would recommend this book to

The notes range from ~100 to ~500 words, depending on how passionate I am about the book and how much I want to say and remember. I also go back and add to these descriptions from time to time, again emphasizing fluidity in the process. 

Altogether, my spreadsheet looks like this: (I have hidden the field of translator, publisher, and genre).

So far, I have found that it suits my needs when tracking books. It has kept me organized, allows me to sort and reflect on books easily, and is a system I will continue using into the future!