GoodReads

Reading By The Numbers

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Goodreads see what your friends are reading

Accessed 12/25/2018 at 8:20 pm ET

Yesterday, I wrote about reading resolutions. I noted that of all the reading resolutions shared with me, none had to do with numbers. Nor did mine. Yet numerical reading challenges are a big deal among many bibliophiles.

The most famous is Goodreads’ yearly reading challenges. You have to have a free Goodreads account. Each year, you can set your own challenge goal beginning a few days before January 1. People set a variety of challenge goals from reading one book to hundreds. As you can see from above, the average is 60, a healthy goal of more than one per week. Your home page will show a progress bar, and whether you are ahead, behind, or on track to reach your goal. All your friends can see how you are progressing as well. You can also see how many pages you’ve read and compare your statistics to past years, what reading you’ve done in various categories and more.

LibraryThing also offers challenges at different levels (50, 75, etc.) and allows you to join groups and post what books you are reading. People make up a variety of creative challenges of reading different genres, reading through the alphabet (each book title starts with a successive letter of the alphabet), and a variety of other creative challenges.

Other groups I’ve seen offer monthly challenges. These involve the whole group reading a different type of book each month: eg. science fiction one month, a book about presidents the next. I know one group that is trying to read consecutively biographies of each U.S. president. I could see such challenges building a sense of community–physical or virtual.

I think if this sort of thing is fun and life-giving and occurs in the context of reading that enriches your life, then there is no harm in this, and even positive value in encouraging you and others in your challenge to read, and maybe get exposed to books they might not otherwise read. Personally, it is not something I pay a great deal of attention to. For the fun of it, I always set a goal on Goodreads, but it is a low one for me. I don’t want my reading driven by one of these goals.

It is interesting to me to see how people actually do on Goodreads in comparison with goals. For example, people pledged to read an average of 60 books. So far this year (as of the evening of 12/25 when I’m writing this), they’ve actually read just under 13, a bit over one a month. More striking to me is that slightly less than 0.7 percent of people have completed their challenge with a week to go. Maybe there will be a spurt in the last week. I wonder how many will read a bunch of really short books to reach their goal (I’ve heard of people doing this).

This suggests to me that this reading challenge thing isn’t working for quite a number of people. I would propose, instead, thinking about the number of minutes a day you want to read and figuring out where you will set aside that time in your day. A rough guide is that for every minute you read, you will read that many books in a year (15 minutes, 15 books; 60 minutes, 60 books; etc.). That might vary based on length of the book and the type of book.

The real point is figuring out where in your life you will make space for reading, if you share my belief that reading is a valuable, life-enriching activity. It might mean something as simple as deciding to read a book for the twenty minutes of your mass transit commute each day instead of flipping through your phone. I get 30 minutes of reading in on my Kindle each day while on my treadmill. Hopefully some of your time is in a comfortable chair with your favorite beverage.

Mortimer Adler is reputed to have said, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” It seems to me that the only benefit of any of these number games is to set us up for books to get through to us. If that isn’t happening in our number games, it might be better to abandon them, or at least ask ourselves why we are reading. What good is it to read 52 books if we can’t express what the value of any of these was to our lives? By the same token, a single book that changes our mind, that captures our imagination, that informs a critical choice, that gives us hope, or that inspires by example counts for more than all those forgotten books.

What it comes down to for me is that I don’t want to read more; I want to read well. I hope that for you. My reviews started and continue to function as a way of helping me read well, by trying to capture the essence and significance of a book. At least some times, that seems to be helpful for others, in figuring out what is worthy of their time and attention.

So, my hope for all of us in 2019 is that we read well, however few or many books we read. It seems to me that this is what the precious gift of literacy is all about.

 

Shelving Solutions

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One of my shelves

One of the challenges for voracious readers is where to shelve their books. In terms of physical books, I am at the point where any book I finish goes on the giveaway or resale piles unless I pull something else off the shelves in its place. If I haven’t thought of or read the book in ten years, it’s a good candidate to get culled out.

A Bookriot article today, “Ways to Shelve Your Books on Goodreads” brings up another shelving dilemma that our book apps create. Where do we shelve our books electronically? Actually, this has been quite useful at times when I have done posts on books in a particular category. The challenge is figuring out the categories, which I may suspect vary widely from person to person. The article suggests some different ways including the year read, the format and location, the genre, by author and book identifier. Here’s what mine currently looks like:

Goodreads Bob Trube The United States 1 056 books

The article provides several examples for different kinds of readers. I am probably much like the author of the article in that my categories get more specific with types of literature I especially like. In my case, it has to do with various subcategories of Christian literature. Mine include works of theology, spiritual formation, on culture, on politics, leadership, ethics, apologetics, and Bible study and more. Under biography, I created a category of presidential biographies because this is one of my favorite genres. Probably I should create one on British royalty!

That brings up another question. When do you create a new category? And if you do, do you go back and “re-shelve” books into that category. I did this with presidential biographies and when I created my “inklings” shelf, but, because I read numbers of books, that can be a bit of work. I might be inclined to consider it “busywork” that I don’t have time for. But that is just me.

Probably the greatest usefulness of this to me is that I regularly get asked the question of “what is a good book on…?” It can be handy to pull up my shelves on my phone and offer a few suggestions. If it was just up to memory, I’d probably find myself saying, “I’ll get back to you” which may never happen.

It is also handy in providing a more extensive set of categories than is easily accommodated here on the blog. I still dream of creating an indexing system that would work here, but at this point it is a dream. You can always search a title on the blog. For categories, my Goodreads page works better and all the reviews I do here are also there.

All this falls in the category of “first world problems.” My suggestion if you are trying to create more shelves than “reading” and “read” is that you create a list of the categories of books you most like to read. Create new categories for things that don’t fit.  Then as you go along combine categories where the numbers of books remain just a few. Figure out if there are any categories that are particularly relevant to your work or other interests. And don’t worry if it looks nothing like your friends. That’s what makes it interesting!

Goodreads Recent Changes

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Goodreads so you finishedMany of you who are book lovers use Goodreads to catalog your books, track what your friends are reading, and read reviews of books you might be interested in. There are currently 55 million Goodreads members and 1.5 billion books added to the site. I’ve been on Goodreads since 2011, and it was the “gateway drug” that got me into book reviewing and blogging.

This is kind of an update on some of the recent changes, at least the ones that I have noticed. One that started turning up in my email inbox recently was that whenever I finished a book Goodreads sends an email that shows the book, my rating, and links to my review. Not shown on the screen capture above is that it also allows me to see any friends who are reading the book, their reviews, and the reviews of other Goodreads members. It allows me to go to the Goodreads author page, even dead ones (there is one for Gerard Manley Hopkins which I can follow). It also allows me to like and comment on friends activity, and even to post a question about the book. What I discovered is that about the time Goodreads introduced this feature, I saw an uptick in likes and comments on my reviewed books, even ones I reviewed in the past. This seems like a good change that makes Goodreads more interactive.

A second change that  Goodreads has begun is “Goodreads Deals” emails and “Sponsored Books” on the updates feed (on the phone app). The “deals” update is just for e-books but surprisingly does provide options (depending on the book) for Google books, Apple iBooks, Nook, and Kobo, as well as Kindle (Goodreads is owned by Amazon). It is interesting that these deals are on e-books but there seems to be no similar approach with print media even though e-books have been waning in popularity. Still, I give Goodreads credit for not promoting only Amazon.

Not so with “Sponsored Books.” Here you have options for purchasing the book in whatever format you are interested in, but only from Amazon. There are also inserts of books that are “new” or “popular” which also direct one to the Amazon site.  So far, this only appears on updates on the Goodreads App, not on the website. It appears that you can indicate you are not interested in a particular “sponsored” book, but not these others, which are interspersed with friends’ updates. Rarely are any of these of interest to me. For some reason, who is reading the book often catches my eye and makes it of interest. The “recommendations” function is better, even if it often recommends books I’ve read but haven’t logged on Goodreads.

One thing with both of these changes is that they drive online purchasing, which of course is the interest of the online book seller behind this site. At least the page for each book on Goodreads offers the option of looking for the books in stores like Barnes and Noble, or through the IndieBound site at independent booksellers. One wonders if Goodreads will continue to do this in the future or direct potential buyers to their parent company more and more. This may be the point where those of us who think brick and mortar stores and local businesses are a cultural good should close our accounts. I hope it doesn’t come to that because there is so much I like about Goodreads (and, yes, I also am on LibraryThing).

One of the features I really like on the phone app is the ability to scan a book and add it to one or more of your shelves. It uses your phone’s camera and I just discovered that it not only works by scanning bar codes, but even by scanning the cover of the book. It will pop up options for your book which you can then add to your shelves. The cover scan worked on every book (a limited sample) I tested it on. This is much better than typing in a title and searching a list for your book. I only log books as I read them, but I could imagine going through my whole library in a relatively short period of time if I wanted to do this.

These are not the only changes on Goodreads. I’d be interested in what changes others who use Goodreads have seen and what you like or don’t like about them.

 

Why I’m Not Obsessed with My Goodreads Reading Challenge

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Goodreads Recent Updates

My Goodreads Reading Challenge as of 5/18/17

I guess there is something to our nature as human beings that needs challenges. It could be losing weight. Or running a marathon in under three hours. Or getting 10,000 steps on your Fitbit. Those of us who are bibliophiles have our own challenges. And one of the most popular is the annual Goodreads Reading Challenge. This year, over 2 million people have set reading challenges for themselves. As of right now, their challenges add up to 94,585,110 books, or roughly 46 books a person. I’ve seen challenges anywhere between reading one book to hundreds. This year I set a goal of 110, five more than my goal last year. I do it mostly for the fun of seeing the goals of my friends. I always read more than my goal without really trying.

I’m writing about this today because of an amusing article in Bookriot titled “Why I’m Obsessed with My Goodreads Challenge Tracker.” I think for this writer (and apparently a number of commenters!) that this really is an obsession. Would you consider reading a bunch of children’s books, graphic novels and novellas at the end of the year just to make your challenge obsessive? Would you consider yourself an abject failure, a wipeout, if you got behind on your reading goal, or horror of horrors, finished the year short of your goal? Apparently this writer is far from alone.

I guess there is one simple reason why I do not obsess over my challenge. And that is that, short of an emergency, I set a goal that I will reach with time to spare, given my reading habits. That way I get to enjoy all those good feelings the writer describes of seeing her list of completed challenges and being ahead on the current one. Shouldn’t something connected with your favorite activity make you feel even better about it?And by most standards 110 books (a bit over two a week) is a goodly number of books. Some think I’m crazy that I read that many.

I don’t like the idea of worrying that I’ll fall behind if I sink my teeth into a really long history or Russian novel. It’s nice to have some slack if other things rise to greater importance and I have to set aside my books.

Jesus of Nazareth once said that we should be careful in trying to remove a speck from someone else’s eye while we have a log in our own. As I thought about this, it occurred to me that I may have book-related obsessions that make the writer’s look benign.

Probably one of the biggest is simply keeping up with my “to be read” piles, or for that matter, the “to be reviewed” pile. I swear that when I turn out the lights at night, they multiply! Actually it is a case of requesting more interesting books to review from various publishers than I should. I probably shouldn’t buy any. That, as much as anything accounts for reaching reading goals–it is not the goal, but the burgeoning TBR pile that can sometimes lead to obsessive reading (“gotta get through this–it’s been three months since the publisher sent it on my request!”).

Objectively, I haven’t done too badly with this, reviewing 30 books that were advance review copies so far this year. It’s fun when a new book to review comes in the mail–until you add it to the pile and queue it with the others and have that realization that it will be a while until you read it unless you read faster! Funny how you don’t think of that when you are reading the description of a book you are considering requesting! Then the rationale is, “that looks like an important book, I’ll fit it in somewhere!”

Well, I think all I’ve accomplished here is to demonstrate that booknerds are indeed quirky people. But you already probably knew that, whether you are a booknerd or not. But to paraphrase my favorite teacher–“let him (or her) without obsessions cast the first stone!”

 

 

First Impressions of LibraryThing

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200px-LibraryThing_Logo_medium

About a month ago I took the plunge and set up a LibraryThing account. Accounts are free for the first 200 books you catalogue on LibraryThing. For larger collections, you will need to pay $10 a year or $25 for life. Obviously, this is different from GoodReads, which is free, no matter how many books you have.

The name of this site and the term cataloging suggests the big distinction between GoodReads and this site. GoodReads is a social media site that allows people to share books they are reading or have read with their friends. Incidentally, it does allow you some capability to catalogue your books by categories you make up. LibraryThing is much more library based, allowing you to catalogue your books, and even access cataloging information used by librarians.

Let me give you a quick tour. Once you’ve set up your account, the first page you will visit is “Home” which is also your “Dashboard”. In the left column you can go to “recent news” “about you” and “discover”. From your Dashboard, you can add books, or import books from other sites like GoodReads and Shelfari (I haven’t tried that yet because I will then need to be a paying customer). You can edit your profile and add pictures. And you can access groups and forums, which, unlike many on GoodReads, seem quite active. Below this is information about your books, images of your most recently added books, your collections and tags, and automatic recommendations of books you might like based on yours, as well as member recommendations of other books similar to a book you’ve both read. Then there are conversation topics, local events for your area, and my favorites: authors who were born or died on this day.

If you click on a book you have added, it will take you to a page chock full of information about the book. You can see how many members have it, how popular it is, links to various sites that sell the book, including free sites. You can rate the book, add a review, put it in different collections, and tag it. The page provides a word cloud of popular tags. You can see who else has it, get recommendations of other books you might like, read other member reviews and extensive information about the book from publication date, to characters, places, awards, epigraphs, and quotes and book descriptions.

Perhaps the most fascinating page is the “Zeitgeist” page, subtitled “more information than your require.” For example, at the time this post was written, they had 2,052,484 members. eandino2012 has the largest library with 81,313 books. The Hunger Games is their most reviewed book with 2,930 reviews, and J.K. Rowling their top author. Their most prolific reviewer is “bluetyson” with 35,779 reviews (and you thought I reviewed a lot of books!).

Most recently, they’ve set up the ability through TinyCat to create a true library catalogue of your books that works with LibraryThing. It is free to LibraryThing members to use for personal use, as opposed to a public library. It is designed for small libraries, like what most of us have. Signup is at librarycat.org which may be accessed from your dashboard on LibraryThing.

My overall sense is that LibraryThing is geekier than the more socially-oriented GoodReads but has far more cataloging capabilities and connections to so many other book and library-related resources. I haven’t decided yet if I will plunk down for a membership, but I only have 21 books on the site so far. I have to admit that I’ve had lots of fun poking around the site, with lots more yet to explore and try out.

Tomorrow, I will do a post on the genius behind LibraryThing, Tim Spalding.

 

So Where Do You Find Those Books You Review?

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Someone asked this question on a recent post, and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this directly.  Finding books that interest me has never been a problem, in one sense. Finding time to read all the books I’m interested in is probably the challenge–and keeping up with other important things in life. But learning about my sources might be interesting for others, so here goes:

1. My most tried and true way of finding books is simply the local second hand bookstore (in our case, Half Price Books, of which there are several outlets in my home town). Often I do not go there looking for a particular book. My usual practice is that I have several sections (science, fiction, history, and religion) in which I particularly look. I also check out the bargain section–I’ve made some great finds of books I was interested in that I picked up for a song.

2. Of course, these trips are supplemented from time to time with library book sales and visits to other book stores.

3. I also attend some conferences related to my work. There is often a book table with books related to the conference theme and our broader work. Many of the academically oriented books, and those on higher education come from these book tables.

4. The organization I work with has a publishing house, InterVarsity Press. You may notice that a fair number of the books reviewed here come from them. We have the option to purchase new releases at a steep discount, and receive complimentary copies of some books related to collegiate ministry. I read these books because they deal with issues I’m interested in, often quite well. When that’s not the case, I feel free to say so. I am paying for most of those books, even if they are at discount!

5. Some of my books are e-books and I learn of these through three sources: Amazon via their Kindle Daily Deal emails, BookBub, which also emails about daily deals, and NetGalley, which is a website where bona fide book reviewers (in print or on blogs) can request e-galleys of new releases in exchange for posting reviews not only on their own sites but on NetGalley’s site, which provides feedback to publishers. Big danger here is that in the ease of downloading to a reader, you will acquire far more than you can read.

6. I follow reviews of others on Goodreads, in Books and Culture, the New York Times Book Review, First Things, and other periodicals that include reviews. Hearts and Minds Books “Booknotes” is another great source. I often look more at reviews than articles in some journals. Then I keep an eye out for a good deal on the books I’m interested in.

7. One of the things I’ve begun doing is requesting review copies of books I’m interested in reading and reviewing. Review copies are furnished at no cost but involve the commitment to read and review the book often within a 30 to 60 day period, send a copy of the review to the publisher that they can re-post, and to post a review on commercial media like Amazon. So you need to be a legit reviewer with a review platform like a blog. I suggest being sparing in your requests so that you can honor your commitment to review the book in a timely fashion.

8. Occasionally a book will be an “assigned” reading for work purposes. My usual reaction is, “Oh boy–I can even justify reading as a work-related activity!

9. Every so often, I stop by our local library. They have a section with their new acquisitions and this is one more way to learn about recent publications in areas of interest.

10. Finally, there are those books friends suggest or even give you and tell you you “HAVE” to read. I will if I’m interested. My son is a source of a number of these, and thankfully, he knows enough about my propensities to buy stuff that I actually AM interested in!

So there it is. Those are some of the ways I find out about books, and find the books I review. As I said, this has never been a problem in my “bookish” world. But maybe some of these ideas will connect you with new sources of learning about good books. Hopefully, it doesn’t open up new avenues of temptation!