What I Did About The Books I’m Reading and What I Should Do About the Games I’m Playing

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted about wanting to change up the way I was keeping track of the books I read. Previously I posted a book post every few days with the new books in a big list. I was inspired by Sharon Lee who does that and it seemed like fun.

I wanted to make the changes for a few reasons. First off as technical task it was surprisingly frustrating to maintain a list over a series of posts and it was a bit redundant as my GoodReads profile is public and you can see the list there. The other reason was that the book posts were inflating the number of posts I was making in a month and taking time away from working on other things. I though, as a next step, making a monthly “infographic” update might be fun and interesting and maybe teach me a few things at the same time.

As someone who has worked in post secondary education for a while now, I can assure you that nobody (including myself) has any idea what an infographic is. So I settled on an answer that was high on info and maybe a bit low on graphics.

All of the posts are under the Books in 2023 tag and they look more or less like this:

I’m pretty happy. As I said, it might not be as pretty as it might be, but at least for now I’m enjoying making it. I learned, for example that for some reason I haven’t read a single book published in 2023, which seems weird, but now I know.

More technically, I learned a bit about getting formatting to work properly. I also learned that books are almost never in a 2:3 ration. I mean, I shelved books for years, I knew this, but until I tried making a grid of book covers I hadn’t realised just how wacky the world of book cover sizes is. I also messed around with hand crafting a word cloud, mine is certainly not as pretty as some, but I kinda like it.

I’m doing a very simple translation where the author’s percentage of the books translates directly to the font size the author. So in the June example above, Tomohito Oda represented 26.4% of the books I’d read to that point in the year and her name is in 264 point font. Elizabeth Bear only accounted for 1.6% at the time and so she’s in 16 point font.

From a production point of view, it takes me about 3 hours to put together the post and certainly requires more hand done portions than it might. When I set out that was fine but as the year went on, I hand wrote more HTML than I really enjoyed, especially when it came to keeping the two column tables balanced. There’s also still some book keeping that’s duplicating Good Reads.

So eventually, I want to either automate the process or make it more manual. I still like the idea of hand building my infographic, but also creating fewer points where I can get in my way seems helpful too. For the time being I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because it’s fun enough and kind of meditative, without taking up all of my time.

I’m having enough fun with it that I’m thinking about how I can modernise my system of video game tracking. I think those posts are alright, but they have a few problems.

I’ve had a lot of trouble this year keeping track of what I’ve played and when and so the data going into the posts is a lot worse than it was. This has happened before and I might get better about it again, but I’m also a spot right now where games are less important to me than they were. I’m not sure I need to be quite as granular about it as I have been.

There’s also a problem that a lot of games show up every month. If you read those posts regularly you’ll know that my nuanced view of Mario Kart 8 (Deluxe) is “Vroom Vroom Beep Beep” because I really haven’t had that much to say about it in the … almost decade since it game out (the first time). I don’t mind doing a new review for something new or a point about something interesting, but I think those posts are some of my worst writing and I want to put that energy somewhere else.

One of the things I’ve always meant to do with game tracking is build one of those theme river diagrams. At the moment for me capturing the very large things about what I’m playing is important. For example: “The summer of 2023 was the the summer of Tears of the Kingdom” is the kind of insight I’d like to hang on to (and I’m not sure is even that apparent in what I’m doing).

I’d also like to make sure that I have a picture in my head of what I played in a year, new and old. Like right now I know I played Hollow Knight at some point in the last year, and apparently a lot of that was in the winter, and then I played a little bit of Breath of the Wild just before Tears of the Kingdom came out.

Overall, it’s time for a change, I’m just not totally sure what the change is going to be. Writing it out this way makes me think something similar to the book infographic might be the right way to go. Here’s what my 2024 in games looks like at a glance updated each month, with a few insights to spice up everything else.

I think I can also dial back the tracking. I’m not sure at this point that it’s doing me any good and while I don’t think it’s doing much harm if I can streamline to “Here are games I played a little and Here are games I played a lot” that might be what I need. That’s going to be weird and I might end up continuing just because it’s an ancient habit by this point (and imagine all the data I won’t have if I want it later!).

Anyway, those are my Updates updates. Making infographics is fun, if a little bit tedious and even I, after doing something for seven years, can make a change. I don’t know exactly what you can expect in terms of my media consumption nonsense in 2024, but I, at least, intend to have fun with it.