returning to a spreadsheet for book organization

I had a wonderful trip to new york, and while I didn't visit any bookstores (no time), I had some of my favorite coffee and took a long, slow stroll through central park thinking about my life.

favorite cortado ever

I sometimes want to just scroll through my book titles and ponder which books to add to my currently reading list. I am all about current reads. NOT what I have just finished,  but what I am currently reading. With that in mind I am always rereading my favorites even if it is a super slow stroll through them again (hello Jane Eyre).

I have cycled through phases of using Goodreads to organize my reading, and I am kind of sick of it. I had a Goodreads account for about 12 years, and hundreds of followers on it, but I deleted it. I started to be bothered by the thing that doesn't seem to bother anyone else, and that is comments on my current reads.

"OMG, you will love the second half of the book!" ; "This ending will surprise you!" 

This wasn't on the fault of anyone. They weren't trying to spoil the book in any way, it's just the nature of seeing someone who loves a book engage with someone who is going to read it. It started to feel a lot like work and I already struggle with social media (something I am going to work on in 2025).

I do miss keeping an organized spreadsheet of my reading however and an analog journal of my current reads. I have a few ideas for how to reignite this and it includes a printer and a glue stick (more in a post soon).

People say the alternative is The Storygraph. I have tried it and I did enjoy the stats feature, but I am just realizing that I don't care that much about the stats. I reread so often that the stats start to feel like measurements that are quite useless for me personally. I doesn't matter to me how many pages I've read, in what format, in what genre, etc. This is a very individual thing for me. I want to be able to look at my own computer or notebook and review my books and remember how I felt when reading them.

time to delete goodreads for the second time

This could easily turn into a conversation about how much I loathe what Amazon has done to the book industry and how Goodreads is more of a way to study how people read than it is to help you organize your bookish life, but that's an obvious statement at this point. It's simply that I want to go back a time when I could reach on my bedside and "see" what I am working on, own my own thoughts, and not have to wait to log into a device to remember what books I'm reading.

It will take a long time to transfer (probably not that long) my books over to my google spreadsheet, and I will continue to work on this for quite some time. In a dream, I'll add the covers to my steady TBR in the spreadsheet and size them to fit, and take time to reorganize my kindle collections so that when I open my Kindle Fire I can see the pretty covers. 

Here are the sections I want to have in my spreadsheet:

1. Books I own physically
2. Digital books I own (that I don't also own physically)
3. List of books I haven't read
4. Sheet for Thomas Hardy
5. Sheet for Anita Brookner
6. Sheet for Dostoevsky
7. Sheet for Tolstoy
8. Sheet for Baldwin
9. Sheet for Morrison
10. Sheet for seasonal TBRs

That is just a starter. I am sure when I am organizing it, more will come to me. 

I am excited honestly. I have a new journal for reviews, a new journal for favorite quotes, and a stack at my bedside. Let the fun begin.