💻 Books

I had been feeling that Goodreads was not the best tool for me to manage my books. Here are some of the reasons:

• It's a clunky tool that can take a lot of time to tag a bunch of books, etc
• I don't need the social aspect of it, it's just another thing I'm checking too often for no reason
• The reading goals cause me to feel I have to read when I don't want to, or to read short things just to hit the goal
• The rating and reviews didn't do much for me, so I was doing it for no reason

I wanted a simpler solution, so I built my own. It consists of a series of text files which include:

• Year read lists (2022-read.txt, 2021-read.txt, etc)
• To read list
• Currently reading list

There is a generate.py file which takes these in and generates the following on a site:

• A currently reading list
• Yearly read lists
• A to-read list with links for tags
• List of books for each tag
• A list of all tags with counts

Management is simple as it's just text files of books/authors (and tags in one of them) that I can edit in vim. It doesn't do counts for the year. There are no goals. It's just a history of the books I want to read and the books I've read, which is exactly what I needed.

• Source code: https://github.com/0xdstn/books/
• Live version: https://tilde.town/~dustin/books/

👋 Hey! Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about this post, or anything else, I'd love to chat! You can find the best way to contact me on my hello page.