How I Track What I'm Reading- Books Read In 2021

Last week's post was all about Discord as an organisation tool (which you can read about here). In it I mentioned about keeping track of what books I'm reading using Discord. Now, I don't just use Discord for this and my system looks a little different to how I showed it last week since it's a little bit more complex.

You can simply list the books you've read and what you thought of them as Discord messages, that would be 100% okay to do. However, I wanted something a little bit nicer to look at and something I could organise a little bit better.

My Current system

This year I'm trying to read more Star Wars books, and I'm also interested in re-reading some of the books and series' I read as a teenager that I feel I would have a better understanding of now. So I started by entering these in which you can see in the list above, but this will grow and I'll slowly have less tagged with TBR (to be read) and more with finished.

I started by first setting up a Google Form where I could enter all of this information that I wanted which helps to make me want to actually use this and log the books I'm reading. Google Forms is super easy to use. I made a form called "Book Tracker 2021" and then filled out the questions I'd most need to keep track of books; Author, Title, Date Finished. This would be a simple enough way to keep tracking books, but I wanted something that included a little bit more. So taking inspiration from Goodreads and similar websites I then included "Rating", giving the books a score from 1 to 5 (awful - great) and the status, am I finished, in progress or is it something I want to read? This helped the form start to take shape.

After this I looked at the other things I wanted this year from doing this. I wanted to go back and re-read books so adding a tag for any that are re-reads seemed like a sensible option. I want to read more Star Wars books and a lot of the time these have their own series, so adding that option made sense. If I'm reading a lot of books from many different Star Wars series, but never fully finishing the stories then I'm not doing what I wanted.

You can see in the image above that I have these columns that I previously discussed but also I included a "Did you finish?". This is set up to take the shame out of reading and abandoning books for me. If I didn't finish the book that's okay, I've got a Google Docs page set up for any of these so I can write down why I didn't finish. Was it boring? Was the writing style hard for me? Did I just lose interest? Any of these things are okay, and learning what makes me not finish a book will help me in crafting reading lists in the future.

Genre, year published, page count, audience and format are things that I think could be useful later, seeing what type of books I read and how long they are. Also knowing these things can help me to understand what happened if I did or didn't finish a book. Is it too long or short? Do I struggle with print format?

Lastly we come to "Author Info". This is mostly out of curiosity; I wanted to see if I tend to read more authors from the UK or USA and out of those authors if I tend to read more written by male or female authors.

How does Discord come into this?

It's simple - I keep a link to the form and a link to the spreadsheet. These are pinned messages and then because I set up the Google Form to be able to edit responses later, I simply copy and paste the link to each individual entry as it's own message with the title and author so I can search later.

So...

• Will you be using a book tracker?

• Did you make it yourself?

• What are your goals with book tracking?

• Are you going to be using a website like Goodreads or TheStoryGraph?

Please let me know in the comments!

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Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.