At the suggestion of my mother-in-law (bless her), who’s done it for many years, I’ve kept a list of books I’ve read since 1994. I include the title, author, publisher and year of publication, a sentence or two about its subject or plot, the date I finished it, and a letter grade (A+ through F). Audiobooks count, and go on the list. I don’t put a book on the list unless I read it cover to cover, or skim it thoroughly enough that I’m very conversant with it.
Sometimes, I have to admit, when I go back and check my booklist from many years ago, I don’t remember a book, not even a little. If it hadn’t been for seeing my own handwriting about it, I might even deny having read it at all!
As to the OP’s War and Peace example, each time I read it would have one entry on my list. In conversation, I suppose I’d say that I’d read it three times, and then explain about the different translations.
I very strongly prefer unabridged to abridged editions, but if I read an abridged edition, it’s still “a book,” and would thus go on the list.
I used to have a card catolog that I started in the 80s and quit sometime around the time my kid was born in the late 90s. I recorded my rating, title, author, genre, date published, date read and other books by same author I’d read (that part got annoying long for favorite prolific authors and contributed a lot to my quitting).
Now I used Goodreads to record the books I’ve read past and present. It’s only complete from 2011, but I add things constantly when they come across my dashboard.
For the last ten years I’ve photographed the cover of every book I’ve read or re-read and added it to an annual Flickr album, together with a short review of what I thought of it. These days I usually read 50 - 60 books a year, so it’s not a huge imposition or time sink.
For older books I have to rely on my memory and, while I will probably remember reading a book, I often don’t have more than an overall impression or a reoollection of a few scenes.
Lots of people blog about what they’ve read and I don’t see what I do as much different from that.
I kept a list for a couple of years some years back, and restarted the practice this year. I just keep a Word doc, in which I list the title, author, and 1 line about the book. Maybe the subject, whether I enjoyed it, and why. Takes a whopping 10 sec or so to do.
I mostly read library books, so I do not retain them on my shelves. I probably average a little over a book per week, probably 60/40 fic/nonfic. I have a horrible memory for what I read. So if someone asks me if I would recommend any books, I can go back to the list. If I want to recall an author, and see if they wrote anything else … If I vaguely recall having read something I might want to re-read …
But primarily, the list is in reaction to my dismay at how quickly the subject matter, content, and even author/title of so many books I had read vanished from my memory. :smack:
So I can post in Elendil’s Heir’s annual Best 10 Books You Read This Year thread, of course.
I list my books over at Goodreads also. I started in 2008. I don’t care for their rating system, and don’t really know what it’s good for, except that I can tell you I read a lot less now than I used to.
On the up side, Stephen King is my “friend”!
I don’t keep track of which books I have read. In fact, I was reading The Sun’s Heartbeat by Bob Berman recently and parts of it started seeming familiar. Eventually I cottoned to the fact that I had in fact read it several years before. Not a bad book, but not very memorable, obviously.
There are two of us here though, and we both read and buy books. We try to keep track of books owned, which is massively different thing than books read.
The kid’s books we keep seperate. I don’t mind getting a copy of a book already in the house for him. I look on it as giving him a foundation for building his own library on.
Probably shouldn’t post in this thread because I don’t count or number the books I read in any way – that factoid just doesn’t interest me. But I DO keep a record about every book I’ve read that goes back to 1967. In the beginning I tracked them on index cards (yes! paper ones!) and later through various ‘notebook’ type programs. Currently Flashnote.
Each book gets an entry with title, author’s name, date I finished reading it, and a sentence or two about how much I liked or disliked about the book and why. I also make entries for books I abandoned, including how far I got into it and WHY I disliked the book so much. (I’m a completest at heart, so a book has to be really bad before I don’t finish it)
I use these records to compensate for my leaky memory, especially when it comes to names. When I see a review for a new book that sounds interesting, I search the note program for the author’s name and check what I thought about their previous works if I’ve read any. If my reaction to those were really negative, I’ll usually skip the new one, but if the new book still sounds intriguing despite that, I’ll get the book from the library instead of buying it. Saves me a lot of money when I end up tossing this one after 100 pages of “tons of diction mistakes”, too.
Oh, and series books with on-going character/plots arcs also get a reasonably detailed synopsis: names of the leading characters, the main plot points, and – most useful to me – the developments in the lives of the lead characters. So when I pick up the latest book by a ‘usual author’, I can go back and read the entry for the book before that. “Oh, yeah, John’s wife left him, he’s flirting with the department secretary, and his partner has just come out as gay and he’s uncertain how he feels about it.” Gets me back up to speed on their lives in just a minute or two, despite my rotten memory.
I used to write them in the back of my journal, so that was from high school until the birth of Goodreads, where I now mark them read I couldn’t tell you how many without looking, though I do aim for 2 books a week on average. After cancer treatment, I couldn’t sustain my attention and my number of books at the end of those couple of years demonstrated this. Getting back to around 100 a year is satisfying because fuck cancer.
A few months on and I am actually seriously considering giving up on the reading lists that I have been obsessively tracking for almost 19 years! Why? Blame the Bible!
So I am currently undertaking the challenge of reading the Bible from cover to cover. In the past, I have read lots of bits of it as most people have. I’ve read Genesis through Deuteronomy in its entirety and Ruth and possibly one or two others? This was about 2012-3 but I didn’t actually add them to the notebook where I record everything as I hadn’t yet decided if the Bible counts as one book or a whole bunch (in this particular instance, 73 books as I got a Catholic Bible because I wanted to read the Apocrypha as well). Aside from the whole One Book or Many issue (I kinda decided to count it as one book as counting it as 73 feels like cheating), I’ve come to a stalemate on the issue of pagination.
As I am going through the Old Testament, I am also concurrently reading Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews (ie read the Creation section of the Bible, read the corresponding section of Legends; read the Abraham cycle in the Bible, read the Abraham legends in Legends, etc.). My version of Ginzberg is 2 volumes but with continuous pagination that runs across them. So is it one book or two? I decided to count it as one book simply because the pagination is continuous. Then I realized, the particular edition of the Bible that I have, despite being one physical volume, splits the pagination between the Testaments. So Malachi ends on page 1154 and a handful of pages later, Matthew starts on page 11 (after some introductory stuff). Gah! Therefore, if I use pagination as the determining factor, Legends is one book in 2 volumes, but the Bible is 2 books in one volume. If I disregard the pagination, Legends is 2 books and the Bible is one book…other than the issue of whether or not I should count it as 1 book or 73 separate books that happen to be bound in one collection…which also contradicts some of my previous decisions (e.g. each Shakespearean play counts as a separate work even though I may have read one or two plays in a collection of many others in one volume).
Therefore, this has all become a little too obsessive…if I can just get over the idea of abandoning something I’ve been noting religiously (pardon the pun) for nearly 19 years. I know, I know, I have issues.
If you’ve made it through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the rest should be pretty easy.
And while your copy might paginate the Testaments separately, many don’t. But the Bible is still the Bible: If someone held up a different edition, or even a different translation, and asked you “Have you read this book?”, you’d still say “yes”.
In any event, the only reason it’d matter would be if you were, for some reason, asked about the number of books you’ve read. But clearly, not all books are equal: Nobody would expect Green Eggs and Ham to share space on the same list as War and Peace. So, just don’t ask any question for which it matters how many books the Bible counts as.
I like it because I can create my own categories (what they call collections) and add tags to show more detail. It helps me avoid buying books I already own, which has happened when it’s been a while since I’ve read something. Also, I can look at my ratings of previous books by an author and decide if I want the latest, or to wait until it goes on sale.
I do use Goodreads when I want to post a review, as I know more people use that site.
Categories and tags are the same thing in Goodreads; otherwise Goodreads, does the same stuff (ratings, etc.). Is the separate tagging what makes you prefer Librarything?
(I’m not being snarky, honest: I’m interested in the perspective of someone who has used both sites. :))
