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:

What to do about the books I'm reading

 I've spent the last several years tracking the books I've read on the blog. I started doing it more or less become Sharon Lee does it and it seems cool. I also may have some latent quantified selfer tendencies.

It's been fun to do, to some extent and it's something I can do to feel creative without really having to think (and knitting projects are also kinda nice). It also makes me revisit what I've read and keep the keeping track I'm doing on Goodreads organized. I'm not sure whether or not it helped me to read more, but it certainly didn't hurt.

On the other hand, there are some problems. Some of them are technical and then a few are more organization (and now one is ethical).

The first problem I have is that blogger limits the number of tags you have on a post. Actually that's not true. Blogger limits the number of characters you have in tags to 200. I have no idea why, but it means that if I have more than about 3 books in a post I have to leave things out and I really like having the authors and books and series show up in the cloud tag at the bottom of the blog. I suppose I could put one book per post, but that's always felt like too many extra posts.

The next is that it's hard to keep a numbered list in a table in HTML. It's not impossible (and I do actually intend to write up how I automated it) but it means that when I look at my blog on the web on a nice big computer screen it looks good, nice list of numbered lines with enough space for things like the title and the author. However if I look at it on my phone, or at the RSS feed it's messed up. The counting relies on javascript which isn't implemented the same everywhere and often it's a mess.

I used to manually number the table to keep that from happening, but manually numbering 120 rows of an HTML table is an invitation to duplication and mess. It also doesn't' help the inevitable problem that no matter how careful I am, the list I have on the blog never matches the list of have on good reads and I'm at a loss to fix it. I think it was pretty good in 2021, but more or less it's always been wrong.

Keeping the list on Goodreads and on my blog is also redundant, and aside the benefits I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure there's a lot of reason to keep two lists. I think putting the books on the blog also provided me with a good excuse for not writing on things. Oh, I should writing about automatically numbering rows in an HTML table, but I'll just update the books first. Blogging about books has certainly swamped the number of posts I've made about anything else for the last while.

Finally I'm tempted to quit Goodreads. My partner and I have been trying to move a lot of our business away from Amazon, and since the business with Comixology, I've been pretty unhappy to let them be the automatic choice in our life. I've discovered Bookwyrm, which has the benefit of being part of the fediverse along with Mastodon, but on the other hand I really like seeing the handful of friends I'm friends with on Goodreads and I'd be sad to leave there right now.

So I'm not all that sure what I want to do. For the time being, I'm not blogging the books I've read this year. If you're interested then you're totally welcome to keep track of what I've been reading over on Goodreads. I think some kind of periodic data project might be the way to go, since there's a lot of fun visualization things that I could be doing and that would also keep me in touch with the books I've read the way blogging them did. 

There are other more general thoughts I've been having about blogging, none of which I'm all that ready to write about. For now, I think this is where I'm at, less book blogging and I'm going to have to find something else to do when I need a slightly brainless project. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.