Wrangling Your Reads: Tracking Your 2023 Reading Goals
Welcome to the future, friends. It is 2023 and with this new year come new reading goals and resolutions. And for me? 2023 means a brand new start to my favorite reading spreadsheet. If you’re reading this article, I’m going to assume that you are also a bookish person who likes to keep track of all the different things you read. If you like the system you’re using, feel free to blaze on ahead with a nod and my blessing. If you’re perhaps looking for a way to spice up your current routine or just need some fresh ideas, look no further. Here are some of our staff and community’s favorite ways of wrangling all of our reading.
Goodreads
Goodreads is the good ol’ workhorse of internet reading tracking. Owned by Amazon, it features yearly reading challenges you set yourself, as well as ways to follow what your friends are reading and liking, other bookish groups, giveaways, author interviews, listacles and more. Perhaps the most popular form of reading tracking, this is a great, low-time-investment way of wrangling your yearly reads.
However, Goodreads notably has not had major updates in either its interface or its features since, basically, the dawn of the internet. Those who would like more data about their reading life or simply desire more features (like being able to give half-star ratings or keep a DNF [did not finish] shelf) may find Goodreads frustrating in its spartan offerings. Additionally, since Goodreads is also a social media platform at its heart, reviews there often go for shock and awe rather than thoughtful contemplation. While these can be interesting to read, they aren’t always the most helpful for sussing out if you’d actually like a book or not.
I personally only use Goodreads for one specific group related to Book Riot’s read harder challenge. Like many others, I have made the switch to…
The Storygraph
A Black-woman-owned answer to the behemoth that is Goodreads, The Storygraph offers many of the same features with many more advantageous upgrades. Like Goodreads, you can set a yearly number of books you’d like to read, follow friends, and leave reviews. Unlike Goodreads, it offers significantly more features. Some of my personal favorites are its buddy-read feature, the fact that you can give partial star ratings, and its listing of trigger warnings. Plus, you can pretty easily upload your Goodreads history onto The Storygraph (the website gives a handy little step-by-step guide on how to do this), so you don’t have to worry about losing your history.
The buddy read feature allows you to set up a buddy read with friends, and as you note your progress through the book, it allows you to leave notes and comments for your friend that is not visible to them until they mark that they have also passed that part of the book. The reviews feature on Storygraph is also much more robust than Goodreads—it allows you to input if a story is fast-, medium-, or slow-paced, whether it centers more on characters or plot, and a whole myriad of other things. It also takes all of the data you feed it about your reading and makes a bunch of tidy little graphs for you to look at (which the data nerd in me loves).
Although The Storygraph is lacking in aesthetic appeal (in my opinion), and sometimes I find answering all of the questions it asks of you for reviews overwhelming, I think this is a really great option for those who are looking for a more in-depth bookish social media platforms.
Reading Journals
Modern Mrs. Darcy’s My Reading Life
A favorite of our staff here at Dog-Eared, the bookish blogging maven Anne Bogel pulled out all the stops for this journal. It’s beautiful and hardbound, has dozens of pages of book lists to help add to your TBR (although, I don’t know about you, but that’s rarely a problem for me), includes space for reflection on your reading life and how you might make it better and more joyful, and has fun quotes and other tidbits scattered throughout.
The actual book tracking spaces have room for the basic book info like author and title, but also room for you to write about specific themes it touches on, ratings based on enjoyment and the craft itself, as well as quotes you might want to remember from the book. It also has a table of contents at the front where you can add in which book review is on which page, making it easy to flip to specific reviews if desired.
My only issues are tiny nitpicky things, like how this journal only has spots for 100 books (and I’m insufferable, reading closer to 200 books a year and dislike having to start a whole new journal in July), though I recognize that is not an issue for most people. I also have large handwriting, and the space left for quotes isn’t enough for even one quote most of the time, making that space seem extraneous.
Bibliophile Reader’s Journal by Jane Mount
Another darling little hardback reading journal, the hallmark of this one is its adorable little illustrations scattered throughout. From a grid of books with good movie adaptations, to the elements of Jane Austen’s writing room, to simple piles of great books, one of the great delights of adding entries to this journal is discovering whatever illustration pops up next. Another benefit of this journal, especially for those of us with large handwriting, is its size—a little larger than My Reading Life, and its reading tracking pages don’t have much text or designs taking up space.
Like My Reading Life, it has book lists at the back to help give you more ideas if necessary while its extra space is a little more free-form. The blank pages at the end of the book leave plenty of room for reflection, book club notes, end-of-year rankings, or more space to think about the books you really liked.
One thing I wished this journal had, however is page numbers or some kind of way to keep track of the number of books read without me having to count myself (I know—basic math! The horror!). Page numbers would also help you reference specific books quickly like the table of contents does for My Reading Life. And like any bound journal, there is only so many pages, which means you might have to buy a new one in the middle of the year.
Bookish Bullet Journals
If you are a very particular person, making your own reading journal might be your best bet. I’ve included a tiktok from an account I love—@alltheradreads. Her reading journal is beautiful and intricate and has her exact needs in mind. Some features she includes are an index, a color-coded reference key and washi tape notation, and stats pages. She makes room for specific reading goals, different challenges she’s participating in, and book club spreads.
You can tell a lot about her reading personality and reading taste because she makes space for recording “major weeper” reads and “couples I loved,” and has several pages to track diverse titles. This is the great benefit of making your own journal in a blank notebook—total customizability. You can make it as pretty or plain as you like, and if you don’t track something—like publisher info—you’re not wasting space. If you like to keep track of more—like which days of the year did you finish books on—you can add in that space.
Making journals like this can be really time consuming, and some people feel pressure to make their journals look like everyone else’s—but if you go this route, focus on making it work for you! I bullet journaled like this for many years and had lots of fun expressing myself.
Spreadsheets
Now I am not going to spend my valuable time on this Earth extolling the virtues of Google Sheets or Excel to you (my best friend, however, could sing the praises of Excel ‘til kingdom come). However, I will praise for the rest of my days Book Riot’s reading log. This is my third year using it, and I delight in adding in the data from each book I read. This specific spread sheet collects tons of data—genre, intended audience, DNFs, if the book is translated, from which language?, does it have disability rep?, is the author queer?, the characters? And the spreadsheet then generates tons of beautiful graphs. It also has space to track the Read Harder challenge, which I deeply appreciate.
A glimpse of what my reading log is looking like this year.
I love recording all this data not only because I’m a bookseller and keeping track of these things make it easier to better serve our reading community, but because it pushes me to read out of my comfort zone and discover books I wouldn’t have otherwise read. It’s also a huge motivator to see different slices of pie charts increase.
However, like making your own reading journal, it’s plenty easy to make your own spreadsheet to customize what you care about most in your reading. Though it might not be as fun, flashy, or pretty as other reading tracking options, I find that centering myself in a spreadsheet is much more valuable to me than a more socially-oriented style of reading tracking.
Social Media
My co-blog manager, Sarah loves tracking her reading through social media. Though she would not call herself a bookstragrammer, many do (including our boss, Amanda when we were guests on the Bubbles and Books podcast), because Sarah tries to (and largely succeeds) in posting every single book she reads on her Instagram (@harimaubetina). This helps her keep a visual reminder of her reads and makes it easy to reference her always-helpful reviews (I may be biased here, but her reviews are the best, and always super entertaining). Tons of people love to keep track of their books in this way or on Twitter.
One of the coolest aspects of tracking your books this way is that you might get to chat with the people who made the books you loved! Sarah had one of her reviews reposted by one of our favorite translators, Anton Hur, and had Jessi Jezewska Stevens reach out to her after Sarah reviewed her book The Visitors. Publishers might also send you free books too, if you’re lucky.
Sarah’s recent review of Idol Burning
I struggle to keep up with taking pretty photos and writing cogent thoughts about every book I read, so I’ll leave this method to more talented readers than I.
There are even more ways than this to keep track of your reading (up-and-coming apps like Litsy and Readerly are notable examples), but I’d love to know—how do you track your reading? What do you get out of your reading tracking and how do you think you could continue making your reading life better? Let us know if the comments below!
