Once upon a time, also known as last year, I was obsessed with keeping my Goodreads up to date. I added books to it as soon as I finished them and I tried to include a couple of sentences about each book, mostly for my own record. But this year I’ve found that my attitude towards that has completely changed and it’s led me to question whether I’m interesting in tracking my reading in this way anymore?
I haven’t added any books to my read shelf since February, despite having read over 40 books since then. At first I stopped so that I could focus just on getting books read, but then I read too many and didn’t want to spend all my time adding them into Goodreads. By that point, I started thinking about what the whole purpose of adding those books was. I have two spreadsheets which I use for my reading—one tracks everything I’ve read in the year, as well as how many I unhaul vs how many I buy and genres, series and etc, the other spreadsheet tracks my TBR by the year I purchased the books in so I can make sure I am reading a good mix of new and old things.
The TBR spreadsheet is a little newer—I started it in November 2019, but it’s been a game-changer for my reading. Mostly in a good way, though occasionally it does lead to stress. But I’ve been using this same reading spreadsheet since 2015 and it’s the easiest way for me to keep in mind what I’ve read and what challenges, genres or whatever that I need to be dedicating more time to. No one sees this spreadsheet apart from me so it doesn’t matter if it takes me a week to update, or if I decide to start a challenge that I never end up getting around to. What I mean to say is that it’s less stress.
So Goodreads has instead become sort of obsolete for me. I often share my thoughts about books on here, and the ones that I don’t, often get discussed on my channel instead. For the last few months, Goodreads has really just become the place where I track what books I’d eventually like to buy or borrow from the library, or a way to check what others are saying about a book before I do either of those things.
With people moving over to different platforms, like Storyograph and so on, I’m left wondering whether there’s any point me doing that to or whether I’m happy where I am. I’d love to hear your thoughts down below!
Earl Grey Books 