I’ve built a library!
One thing I enjoy about having this site is recording bits and pieces of my life. From my work I have my speaking page. There’s also my uses page and my now page, both of which I have the git history of so I can see changes to everything over time. To me they’re a fun record of where I’ve been and something I enjoy sharing with everyone.
I’m not a big fan of TV shows, nor do I watch many movies. Instead I read and I listen to music. For the latter I listen to too much to be able to record it all. For my books, however, I’ve been using Goodreads since 2010. It records most of what I’ve read, but over the years it’s lost features and even entire books I’ve recorded in it. To be honest, given the lack of investment in it I wouldn’t be surprised if it was eventually shut down.
This past week I finally copied my book data off of Goodreads to this site. I started this project in 2021 when I first exported my Goodreads data, but I never got around to implementing it.
Now I have a shell script that can process my Goodreads export file (it exports a .csv file) and saves each book and its data to markdown files on this site. The only thing it can’t do, as the export doesn’t include the data, is properly handle multiple readings of the same book but, as the read date is an array in front matter and I don’t read too many books more than once, that was easy to add manually.
Today I’m proud to launch this as a new feature on this site, my library page. It contains a sortable list of every book Goodreads had going back to 2010 and a summary for my own visualization of how many books I’ve read each year.
It’s not something many people are going to be interested in, I realize that. But it is something I enjoy having to keep track of everything I’ve read over the years.
As for keeping it up to date, I’ll keep using Goodreads while it’s still there. My import script can take a fresh export and add the new books. I’ll try to do that monthly. I read so many books on my Kindle that this workflow will be easy to maintain either way.
These are the type of features that are so much fun to build and review over the years. I’m looking forward to seeing it grow and how my reading changes in the years ahead.