Let’s Talk Bookish: Freebie!

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022.

Freebie week! I do like these freebie weeks, as they give me the opportunity to go back and look at some Let’s Talk Bookish topics I missed, as I did come into this fairly late. I’ve done a few of these so far, working my way from April 2022, but I’ve skipped a few weeks here and landed on the prompt for May 27th, 2022.

Let’s Talk Bookish May 31st: Freebie!
Tracking reading 
(Aria)

Prompts: Do you keep track of the books you read? If so, do you use Goodreads? Storygraph? Another platform? Has the way you keep track of your reading changed since you started blogging? What are the pros and cons of tracking your reading?

I do keep track – right now I use both Goodreads and Storygraph. I rate and review on Goodreads, but I use Storygraph purely for tracking and for Reading Challenges. Both, I think, have their pros and cons, but I’m not the biggest fan of Storygraph’s ‘review’ style with the prompts, and fairly early I realised they were just adding an extra step to the process I didn’t really need.

I think it’s changed in that I’m a little more detailed now – I use tags on Goodreads more, and feel like I’m very often adding new ones to ‘refine’ what I’m including. And there’s the addition of Storygraph, which wasn’t an option when I first started. I did drop the ball on adding the reviews themselves to Goodreads in more recent years, but I did a huge ‘exercise’ recently where I basically went back through a long, long list of books and added the reviews for as many as I could.

The pros of tracking my reading are that it makes it a little easier to decide what I want to read next – if I can’t remember if I’ve read a particular author before, I can go back and check, and see what I thought of their stuff! It means I can scroll through for stuff like Top Ten Tuesday and see what books I want to include, and it prevents me from accidentally picking up a book I’ve already read.

The cons are largely time – it doesn’t take a whole lot of time, but it all adds up, especially when you factor in the different steps for ‘tracking’. For me, that includes rating on Goodreads and adding the tags, as well as making sure the date is correct if I, for example, finish the book the night before or a couple of days before and haven’t had a chance to mark it as finished. Storygraph is much easier, as all I do there is mark it as started then finished.

Overall, I am glad I track my reading. Reading Goals give me something to reach for and in general it’s just fun seeing, over time, my different tastes and what I’ve strongly responded to. I’d love to hear if and you track your own reading!