My Thoughts // How Often Do You Look At Your Goodreads Shelves?

How often do you look at your Goodreads shelves?

Never?

Me either, so you can imagine there was a whole lot of work to be done when I decided to clear and organise my shelves.

This decision was not made on the spur of the moment. In fact, I had been contemplating it for a couple of weeks but it was such a daunting task and so much work that I put it off a little (doesn’t sound like me at all). It was partially inspired by the fact my Kindle is once more in a mess. A while back I had tried to organise it with collections of my read and unread books, etc, but I didn’t keep up with the upkeep of such a venture so my books have once more fallen into disarray. I always intend to sort it but my Kindle is a bit too slow for me to have the patience to do so. What has this got to do with Goodreads? Very little other than the fact I want Goodreads to be able to give me an idea of what I have to read and where I have it from to read it.

The thing with my Goodreads shelves is I have been a member for so very long and my reading tastes have changed throughout that time. When I first began my shelves were YA and fantasy heavy. I still enjoy both categories, but I feel I am more particular about the books I read in them. The same goes for romance. I have a habit of adding any and every romance book I have seen get a slightly good review… or which is going to cheap for Kindle, and don’t consider if I even really want to read it. I needed to go through and clear out the crap I was simply never going to read and held no interest in reading.

So, with such a venture in mind one Sunday I decided to get on it and get organised (instead of writing blog posts like I intended to when booting up my laptop).

I had 500+ books on my ‘Want to Read’ shelf but I also had a ‘to-buy’ shelf that I liked to use for books I didn’t own yet but were on my reading radar and that held almost 600 books. That’s over a 1000 books which I wanted to read. Ain’t nobody gonna get around to reading all of those books! It was time to set out shelves and take advantage of one of the best features on Goodreads: exclusive shelves.

My shelves are now split down by several different categories: read, currently reading, want to read, abandoned books, arcs, borrowed books, kindle to read, maybe buy, and must buy. Some might say that’s too many shelves but it means I can now look at ‘Want to Read’ shelf and see these are just my physical books I have to read. And if I want to read a Kindle book but don’t know what I have to read that’s what the ‘Kindle to read’ is there for. I now which books I absolutely need to buy and those which are just on the radar. I have my arcs and library/Kindle unlimited/Scribd books on another shelf. I finally know what I have and from where!

I’ve never actually liked looking at my Goodreads shelves because they’ve been so crazy but now I look and know what goes where. And even better, in the long process of sorting books to the right shelves I actually managed to shed some books I knew I would never get to reading. It’s probably the best use of a Sunday night in a long time (although I did end up buying a few books as I investigated deals and what books were even about).

I also discovered another amazing feature of Goodreads I’d never discovered before: exporting your shelves. I exported my bookshelves and downloaded the .csv and now I have a nice spreadsheet filled with all of my books and so my next task is to create a lovely spreadsheet for my books I own to try and conquer my unread shelves. I’m planning to get brutal with the DNF-ing and try and bring down my unread figured because it’s a little embarrassing. We’ll look at the success of that one another time. I have loved browsing through that spreadsheet though, there is so much information which is exported in the csv and if you are into stats I know that would be one of the most interesting things to look into.

Basically, my books are now slightly over organised for some people’s likings. I don’t utilise the non-exclusive shelves to the same degree and that might be something new to explore but I have to say, Goodreads has it’s faults (like so many of them) but I have found it has it’s uses too.

Do you use Goodreads to it’s full extent or as an after thought to keep track of books and haphazardly at best? What is your book organisation method or are you like last week Becky where it’s a free-for-all?