A Reading Log for Introverts

More than any other habit, reading has altered the course of my life. I've learned more from non-mandatory reading than from every other class, person, and life experience combined.

Reading is my primary hobby, so I spend a lot of time doing it. With time, I've wound up about as dedicated to planning and organizing what I read as I have to the habit of reading itself.

Here’s my approach.

From Goodreads to Airtable

I was a Goodreads user for years. But Goodreads as a consumer product has suffered from a well-documented decline. I found myself needing features it didn't have, and not needing features it had.

I eventually exported my Goodreads data and imported it into an Airtable base. If you're not familiar with Airtable: it's a relational database with a consumer-grade user interface that's as simple to use as a spreadsheet. I’ve tinkered with the base over the years and have it to a place where I’m fairly happy with it.

Losing the social layer is the biggest loss for most people when considering moving away from Goodreads. I remember enjoying the chemical rush of marking a book complete, knowing my friends would notice my accomplishment. But once I lost social reading, the urge for it faded with time. I came to prefer reading at my own pace, in private.

If I wanted that social layer back, I could easily share my Airtable with close friends, giving them access to my progress and book reviews.

Yearly planning

At the beginning of each year, I plan out a year’s worth of reading. I decide about how many books I plan to read, and decide the categories I want to tackle.

I do my research and add books to a “This Year” view, which acts as my reading to-do list for the year. I’ll drop in the Title, Author, a Cover image for each book, and then tick the This Year field to make sure the book shows up in the “This Year” view.

When I’m done reading a book, I’ll tick the Read field, rate it out of 5 stars in the Rating field, and write a brief Review to jog my memory in the future. “This Year” groups books by the Read  field, so books I’ve read in the current year show up clustered below the books not yet marked  Read.

Yearly galleries

At the beginning of each year, I save a new Airtable gallery view named after the past year ("2020", "2019", ...). That's the view I use when I want to click back through previous years and remember what I read.

I add cover images to each book entry, so those yearly Gallery views are a beautiful time capsule of my reading history, along with the title, author, and date I finished the book. Since I'm adding the images myself, I can choose my favorite cover if a book has multiple editions.

Reading with intent

My favorite feature of the database is the Lists table.

There are hundreds of millions of books in the world. How do I choose which among the millions are worth my time?

I start by prioritizing books within categories like these:

  1. A topic I’m interested in learning about, like evolution, energy, or World War II
  2. Career reading that will help me get better at work
  3. Old classics (I agree with C.S. Lewis' take on why that’s important)
  4. Random stuff that strikes my interest or books people give me

Within those categories, I lean on recommendations from people I admire. Often I'll mine these recommendations from public lists or citations within other books.

I'll find recommendations in lists like the books that Bill Gates has recommended, the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Nonfiction lists, The Personal MBA (business books), Amazon’s 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime (some popular stuff, and some classics), Mortimer Adler’s big list of the great classic books, and a handful of smaller lists from design/tech industry folks or smart people I respect.

I record these lists in a table called  “Lists” which I link up to books with an associated field.

Most new books I add have an associated List. Many times, a given book will appear on a few lists, so I’ll link it up to as many as it appears on. It’s useful to recall who recommended the book and why I planned to read it in the first place, and I can track my progress through the lists.

For a little extra context, sometimes I’ll write a note in my Reasons To Read field on the book entry.

Want to try?

My system isn't sophisticated, and it takes a bit of work to maintain. But it does what I need. I can move stuff around at will and export the data as a CSV with a few clicks.

It's also hacker-friendly. If I wanted, I could embed it on my website, or use the Airtable Rest API to pipe the data into a fancy front-end. I can access it on my phone with the Airtable apps, or from my computer on the web.

Best of all, it's private and quiet.

If this sounds interesting, you can try out my base. Copy it, remix it, improve it, etc.

If you do, please let me know on Twitter. I'd love to hear about it.