Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky at Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani at Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022.  Aria at Book Nook Bits has been the host since the beginning of April 2022. Let’s Talk Bookish is a meme where participants discuss certain topics, share their opinions, and spread the love by visiting each other’s posts. Topics for each month will be posted a month in advance on Aria’s blog.

This weeks topic on Let’s Talk Bookish is tracking reading, and I have such a lot to share with you about it!

Last year I failed miserably at tracking what I was reading. I couldn’t even tell you how many books I read. When I reached the end of the year and everyone was providing updates on how much they’d read during 2021 I got increasingly frustrated and decided that this year would be different.

From the start of the year I have been tracking my reading in Goodreads, I have set a reading challenge of 100 books as I would hazard a guess that this was somewhere close to what I read last year.

However, since I started this blog I have a new way of tracking my reading that is internal to the blog and I’m in love with it.

The plug in that I use is called Book Library and is provided by Nosegraze you use it in the same way as you would the Goodreads book tracker but there is so much more information available. Being part way through the year it’s taken quite a lot of time and effort to get it set up (I’m not 100% complete yet) but it’s so going to be worth it at year end. Once I’ve got all my previous books logged then just adding them as I read them will be easy enough to keep on top of. You’ll be able to see this in action in my monthly wrap up posts but I’ll give you a couple of examples of what it includes here.

Here you can see a list of the books that I’ve added so far, I can add display this either as a list or by month. I can filter on a particular book or on format read, whether or not I’ve read them and whether I own them or not. Being perfectly honest, things like whether or not I own them and the format of them isn’t something that I’m particularly interested in so I haven’t been updating these areas. One thing that I particularly like is that you can include the series, the no of pages in the book, whether you have a signed edition etc. It’s a great way of keeping track of all the books that I own.

Now the exciting bit! The analytics 😁 You’ll see I have this filtered on ‘This Month’ but I could choose Last 30 Days, Last Month, This Year, Last Year or All Time. It’s crazy but I’m really looking forward to being able to see how this changes moving forward.

I’m sure you’re looking at this and going “hang on 7 different series read and 10 standalones doesn’t equal 18 books” this is because I’ve read 2 books from the same series, so although I’ve read from 7 different series, I’ve read 8 books from those series.

You’ll also see I’ve only written one review. This isn’t strictly true. I’ve concentrated on getting posts up on to the blog and I’m updating this when I have a bit of free time. This plug in doesn’t automatically update blog posts into here, you have to manually update them (you literally add the book id from when you input it and the post id) I just haven’t got round to doing this yet.

Now we’re on to the library. If I was up to date with this and just adding books as I was purchasing/loaning them then this would be slightly more exciting but as I’m doing a mass data dump it’s not entirely accurate at the moment. When looking at the pie chart if you hover over a ‘slice’ then it will tell you the actual numbers that you’ve added. Looking at this it’s pretty obvious what genre I read most of. One of my goals that I’ve set is to read across more genres so I’ll be interested to see how this changes over the course of this year.

The amount of stats available for this is brilliant, what was my longest book read, my shortest book read, how many of each genre did I read, when were they published? As you can see most of them have been published in the last 12 months, except for 2 rogue books where I’ve been reading Karin Slaughters back list.

I’ve not included format in here, but you can also report on the format of books read, mine isn’t accurate as I haven’t been adding it in when logging books.

Although there’s a lot more this plug in can do I’m only going to show you one more thing. Ratings.

Obviously I’m a new blog and I haven’t added all my books yet. I started with the books that I’ve read this month (so I’ll be able to share my stats in full at the end of the month) and I’ve had a really good reading month with some fantastic books so this is all looking very positive at the minute. It will be interesting to see what this looks like at the end of the year.

So, there you go. Tracking reading. I’ve gone from one end of the spectrum (not tracking at all) to the other (tracking with loads of analytics). Do track what you’ve read?