Tracking the Books I’ve Read
I finished off my second book of the year this afternoon (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) and I feel that I’m on a good pace. The main issue I had with how much I read last year was not storage for all the books – I read most things on my iPad/iPhone on the Kindle app – but was tracking what I had read. While I commented on most of the books here on BTG, I want to keep a better listing of what I read, authors, and if the books are part of a series. This last is a big problem since so many books these days are part of a trilogy or something and the book clubs I belong to only focus on the starting book. If I can track things better, I can make sure I read the full series instead of leaving so many stories hanging without completion.
Take The Rook – one of my favorites from last year. There’s already a 2nd book in the series and I’m pretty sure Daniel O’Malley has more planned – at least I could see many more stories in this setting. I am not planning on reading Stiletto at this point, but I don’t want to lose track of the fact that I want it on my To Read list.
I also need a better way to track the comics I’ve read and plan on reading. This can be difficult since I sometimes read individual issues and sometimes read the trade paperback version. If I read the graphic novel, I want to make sure I don’t purchase the individual issue and keeping track of these things can get tiresome – particularly when I’m not consistently reading the same titles but bouncing around.
To solve this tracking problem I went where I go for most things…the Internet. Google pointed me to a YouTube for something called Let’s Read. Here’s the video…
The actual video starts around 3 minute in.
The spreadsheet is pretty cool and I think I’m gonna try using this for both comics and novels. I’ll start keeping things separated initially since I read so many more comics since they’re shorter. Sure there are fields that I’ll probably not use as much like country or language, but it looks like a good place to start for keeping up with everything I’m reading these days.