More on what to do about the books I'm reading

After my other post about what I wanted to do with tracking my reading, I spent a while thinking about what was most important to me and then put a post together as a starting point.

I figured details weren't that important since Good Reads tracks all of that, so I really wanted to take a high level view. The other things I wanted to keep was the enjoyment I get out of having the authors in the tags of the posts, but without the pain in the ass of fighting the blogger tag system. 

It turns out that it's not easy to get a report on books from Good Reads. The ,csv I downloaded was missing either a lot of books or a lot of information. I ended up building the stats by hand, which was fairly manageable with 8 books in January. That seems like it'll be more-or-less average for the year. I'm avoiding the urge for now to build a tracking tool. 

A collage of covers seems like a nice way to encapsulate the month and gives me something visual to hang on to. I also decided to build my own word cloud of authors. It's a spiral with authors being added in the order I read them, and then as I read more books of theirs I'll start enlarging the size. I think there are some things that could use adjusting -- I'm not that happy with the font for one thing -- but again my goal for this was to get something done. I do lose the tags in the blog tags, but I don't know how much I care in the long term.

I figured beyond titles and authors I'd keep track of when books where published. I'm surprised how much "new stuff" I'm reading, so it seems like that was worth while. I also already track where I got books from and formats (so I know if I want to re-read), so I tossed that in as well.

It's a start. I don't feel like the look is exactly what I'm looking for, but it'll do for now. And it's reconnecting me with I'm also not sure if it captures the right information, but I don't know that there's anything it *needs* to capture right now. I figure I'll add year-to-date in the February post and go from there. I would like it to have a little bit more of an "infographic" look, but I also want to stay fairly pure in terms of HTML and CSS (at least for now).

If you have any thoughts about tracking books, I'd love to hear them.

Books of January 2023

Reading

Reading Stats

Books Read - 8

Pages Read - 3430

Books Read

Smoke Bitten by Patrica Briggs	The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riorden
Dead Beat by	The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley	44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith
Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zhan	The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin

January 2023 Covers

Authors

Alexander McCall Smith - 1	Angeline Boulley - 1
Ann Leckie - 1	Jim Butcher - 1
N. K. Jemisin - 1	Patrica Briggs - 1
Rick Riorden - 1	Timothy Zhan - 1

2023 Author Cloud

Publishing

Range

Earliest Book - 1999

Most Recent Book - 2022

Decades

2020s - 3	2010s - 2
2000s - 2	1990s - 1

Books

Source

Borrowed From Library - 7

Borrowed From Friends - 1

Formats

Audio Book - 6	eBook - 1
Hardcover - 1

Games of January 2023

For a bunch of reasons, January just hasn't been a time when I've really wanted to sit down and play much. I've mostly been poking at Tactics Ogre and picking up Xenoblade Chronicles more when I've wanted to play something with more story and activity.

My top five games (by play time) for January were:

1. Tactics Ogre: Reborn - I'm a sucker for Ogre Battle stuff, what can I say. The game is pretty satisfying, although I do wish it has an easy mode just to make moving through some of the game a little easier.
   
   


2. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - I'm enjoying the replay and trying to get through doing as little side content as I can. Doing all -- most of -- the side quests and stuff was really important to the world building, but as with all of the Xenoblade games it really ruins the pace, so now that I'm seen everything I'm hoping to get a better feeling for what the story feels like when you're keeping your pace up.
   
   


3. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - Vrooom vroom.
   
   


4. Super Mario World (Nintendo Switch Online)I had 10 minutes to spare and wanted to play something quick, responsive and fun. Super Mario World is one of the best feeling games I actually have installed on the switch.
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for January:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month: