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.