Tracking My "Good Reads"

I'd heard of Good Reads before but hadn't had a chance to register for an account and play around with it until this past weekend. It's a really fun place for bibliophiles to keep a record of books they've read, books they'd like to read, and books they'd recommend to others.

It's a social networking site, so there are plenty of opportunities to build a friends list and join special interest groups of readers who are interested in everything from art to zoology. Within my first 48 hours of becoming a member, I made 7 friends and joined the YA, Banned Books, and Rory (as in Gilmore Girl) Book Club groups.

Adding books to your collection is very easy. You can search by title, author or ISBN, and pull data from sources such as Amazon. You can categorize your collection by creating "shelves" (i.e. "tags") to label and sort your titles.

I am a life long reader and couldn't begin to recreate a comprehensive collection of the books I've read over the last thirtysomething years, so I have decided to start my Good Reads collection with just the dozen or so books I've read since the start of 2008. I'm still using LibraryThing, of course, to assemble an online catalog of my entire book collection as it exists now - including things I own but haven't read (yet). While I'm working on the catalog project, I can track my current reading activity at Good Reads.