💾 Archived View for wilw.capsule.town › log › 2023-03-24-book-logging.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:37:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I've been a member of Goodreads [1] since 2013. I follow a few of my friends and family on there, and whilst it was nice to see the types of things people are reading, I only really ever used the service as a way for logging what I had read. The other social aspects didn't keep me coming back and I personally didn't find the home feed interesting.
As I started to get more into the Fediverse back in 2021, I joined BookWyrm [2] (as @wilw@bookwyrm.social [3]). I was able to export my reads as a CSV from Goodreads and import them into BookWyrm, which I continued to use as a method for recording reads and listens. BookWyrm is excellent, easy-to-use, and less clunky than Goodreads. I can certainly recommend it if you're looking to join or build a community around books.
However, as with Goodreads, I just never really seemed to get involved with the other features or engaged with people on the platform. Like most Fediverse services, BookWyrm is primarily designed to be _social_. People discuss books, write reviews for others, and get inspiration from the people in their community.
I recently came to the realisation that reading doesn't feel like a social activity to me. One of the great things about books is that they are inherently personal -- fiction provides an escape from reality and evokes your own imagination, and other works can (among other things) help to educate and improve your life.
I do enjoy discussing books with others from time to time (and usually in person) but, for now, all I really needed was a simple method for logging reads and listens.
As such, I now simply include a log on my books note [4]. There's not much to it, but it helps me keep track of what I am reading and the frequency. To create the log, I include a CSV section in the note (which I can easily add to) and I use a shortcode (based on the very helpful work by Brian Wisti [5]) to get Hugo to render a table from the CSV content.