Book Tracking & Nerdery

I’m very proud to admit I am a nerd about books. And tracking, though I am not very consistent. Yet. That’s one of my goals this year is to be more consistent in tracking what I’ve read, so I’m going to share my methods in book tracking as a way to keep me accountable.

My Methods

So along with my Goodreads account, I’m using a notebook and a book tracking spreadsheet. It’s copied from Book Riot’s spreadsheet with the addition of some more granular genres and the challenges I’m doing this year. I’m still fixing up the formulas, as they don’t really fill down correctly in the cells, so I have to do them manually. That’s a lot of formulas and I’ve already gotten cross-eyed once today.

I’m still figuring out exactly what I want to put in my journal, but I’m starting out with some reading lists: my classics list, and a couple of others, so I have the fun of crossing them off when I’ve read them. Or put a nice red mark for DNF.

As more keeping track of the books I have, I use a combo of Calibre, Goodreads, and LibraryThing. Well, my LibraryThing is a mess right now. I did an import, and none of them kept their covers, so I’m having to back and edit. And there’s a lot in there whoops. So right now, Calibre & GoodReads are much easier to use.

I buy my books from Amazon & Google Play Books mostly, with FeedBooks as a secondary source of nicely formatted public domain books.

For my e-reader, I use Moon+Pro after I’ve converted my ebooks to epub. I keep the original version + the epub version and use calibre to manage the device. I just had to tell it where to put the books, and Moon+ does the rest. I do wish Moon+ does LastName, FirstName sort of authors names, as it’s a bit weird to look for Jane Austen in the J’s and not A’s.

The notebook is also new to me this year in my book tracking. I’ve bounced around looking at bujo setups and wishing I could draw like the ones I’ve seen on Pinterest or Instagram, but finally found a really pretty hardbound notebook with ruled pages. My writing starts climbing mountains if I don’t have a line to write on.

The first few pages are for the index, then I started numbering the pages from 1 after the index. It’s been a while since I did much of anything long hand so it’s going to be slow going getting my reading lists in my journal.