Spring Cleaning My Bookshelves for #Goodreadance2020
The wonderful Shealea over on Shut Up, Shealea announced a month-long challenge dedicating September to some bookish spring cleaning under the banner of #goodreadance2020! You can (and should!) read her original blog post here. As someone with both an extensive physical TBR and a messy Goodreads account, I jumped on the chance to get some order back into my reading life.
Initially, I intended to do a full spring clean, including my physical books and ebooks. But somehow my September just vanished into thin air so the project of sorting through my 200+ unread books is going to have to wait. Instead, I focused on making my Goodreads usable.
My Goals
- make my Goodreads as easy to use as possible so I’m incentivised to update it consistently
- decide what purpose my “To Read” shelf serves
- get rid of shelves I don’t need/use
- go through all books marked as To Read and kick out the ones I’m no longer interested in
- go through my remaining books and shelve them correctly
Here’s what my Goodreads looked like before I went to town:
As you can see, I have a lot of books marked as “To Read” but the amount of books I’ve actually tagged with genres or formats doesn’t add up. When thinking about how I wanted to approach this challenge, I noticed I don’t actually use my specific shelves consistently and thus not all my books are shelved correctly. Now, the perfectionist in me immediately wanted to go through every single book and change that, but instead, I figure it was my whole system that needed changing.
Evaluating my use of Goodreads
I started by really thinking about what I use my Goodreads account for and came up with the following aspects:
- I use it as a place to save books I hear people talking about, a master list of books to check out
- I use it to write and share my reviews
- I started using it to catalogue the books I own
Using Goodreads to catalogue my owned books didn’t really work for me, I didn’t update it consistently and it doesn’t really offer the features I’d like. Instead, I decided that I’d rather have a spreadsheet to track all the books and ARCs I own. Creating that is going to be an effort for a later month.
That left me with two uses for my Goodreads: save books I’m interested in and share reviews.
How I changed my system
I went all in and got rid of all elements that didn’t serve either of those purposes. That included:
- my genre and age-group shelves. I didn’t use them consistently and a spreadsheet allows me to track those data points a lot better than Goodreads.
- my “books I own” shelf that wasn’t an actual reflection of the books I owned anymore.
- the books on my To Read shelf I have no interest in any longer.
The function of my To Read shelf
As I mentioned before, Goodreads is a way for me to look up and save books that look interesting. My To Read shelf is much more of a “this looks interesting, I think I want to read this someday” shelf if I’m being honest. And I like it that way! It means I have a running list of books I’m interested in whenever I’m looking for books to buy despite my extensive physical TBR.
The problem with that shelf is that I just keep adding to it with no system in place to regularly review the books I put on there. So I made one! At the end of every month, I am going to go through the shelf and re-evaluate the books I added during the month. Anything that I have a vague interest in gets to stay. At least every six months I’ll go through the entire list.
I considered making shelves for my interest level in different books but decided it wasn’t worth it because I’d likely not use it. So yes, my To Read shelf is going to have all kinds of books on there, even those I might not read for a few years but don’t want to forget. It might be a bit chaotic but it’s the easiest system to use for my purposes.
The specific shelves I kept
While I got rid of most of my shelves (including genres and age-groups), there were some I knew I wanted to keep. For now, I have shelves (that really serve as tags) for:
- non-fiction: most of my reading is fiction so it’s a lot easier to tag the occasional non-fiction book I want to read, but the distinction was important to me.
- ARCs: As a newbie reviewer, every ARC is so exciting! I already use Notion to keep track of my ARCs and their publishing dates, but I like tagging them on Goodreads as well.
- audiobooks: I love audiobooks and keeping track of the books I read in that format was something I wanted to keep doing. Eventually, I might delete this shelf because my spreadsheet is going to serve the same purpose, but for now, I like that people can see which books I’ve listened to.
- library books: My local library has a fairly small section of English books but I wanted to keep track of the ones they do have that I’m interested in. That way I know exactly which books I won’t have to buy unless I love them so much I want to own them.
- death books: One of my special interests are books about death, grief and forensic science. I have a section of my real-life shelf dedicated to them and wanted to replicate that on Goodreads. That way the death books I still want to read don’t get lost in my giant To Read shelf!
The final product
I started with 423 books marked as To Read and ended up with 332 as I’m writing this. That’s almost 100 books less! I also got rid of half my shelves and now have just six. Additionally, I have a system in place to review my To Read shelf and set up a reminder for the end of each month to keep me accountable.
Final Thoughts
I am so, so glad I decided to participate in this challenge! It gave me an opportunity to reflect on how I want to track my reading and be more intentional with the tools I use. Overall, this whole endeavour took me a few hours (that I spent while watching Critical Role in the background), but it’s going to save me a lot of time and mental clutter in the future. And because it’s such a simple system, I’m way more likely to stick to it!
Now all that’s left to do is to go through my physical/ebook TBR and create a spreadsheet to track all of that. But that’s a project for another day. Right now I’m going to lean back and enjoy the streamlined look of my Goodreads page.
Did you participate in #goodreadance2020? What has been the most impactful change for you?
I hope you have a lovely day,
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