Managing Book Lists

I'm obsessed with reading, and I keep a list of books that I want to read in Goodreads. It’s a huge list, so I’ve got it divided into subcategories.

I use my Goodreads feed for discovery – I tend to pay a lot of attention to the books that someone in my network has read and recommended, and I save them as Want to Read. I also prioritize books based on any thematic exploration I might be doing. Lately, for example, I’ve been reading a lot of books on diet, nutrition, and Alzheimer’s. So I’ll look for five to seven other books on the same topic and bump them up to that list.

I also sort books by the year in which I read them, so when people on Twitter are asking what’s the best book everyone read last year, I can go back to this list, do a quick visual scan, and share the top three that I love the most – or just give people the entire list. Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary is a three-level prioritization of books I want to read, basically in order of how much signal they’ve had in my network.

My McNally list is for books that have had the most signal – multiple mentions from multiple people. They’re the ones I keep seeing mentioned on Twitter, or shared and rated on Goodreads, or that come up in conversation a lot. Procured is for the books I’ve recently bought, and Vacation is the ten books I would bring if I were to go away on a leisure trip next week. I can tell from looking at this that I read 55 books in 2019, and I’m up to 42 for 2020, which is almost a book a week – and honestly, I’d like to take it up to a book every other day.

⚒️

Tools

List

2 views

List

Table

Goodreads

goodreads.com

Back Home