Tracking the Books I’ve Read 📚

Began working on some updates to my site this weekend. First up was adding my reading log. So, now, I have a reading section that has almost every book I’ve read; the data from which I exported from Goodreads. Also, on my main page, I have an image grid of covers of the most recent eight books I’ve read. In both cases every title links to my affiliate shop on Bookshop (I doubt I’ll make any money from that, but it was easy enough to do and sending people to Bookshop versus Amazon felt better.). Both of these features draw their data directly from my reading log, which is just a csv file I keep updated with the title, author, publication year, isbn, and date finished for each book I read. Pretty simple and straight-forward, so it feels like something I’ll be able to keep up.

I still need to clean up my reading log, though: I don’t have every book added yet because I’m missing some books I read years ago before I started tracking things in Goodreads and I also need to go through and make sure that every book has a valid isbn file, because some of them seem to point to editions that are out-of-print and messes up the affiliate links. Despite that, it feels like a good start.