About

This website is where I keep track of what I read, and I use the term “book” broadly. It could be a comic, a collection of short stories, a single short story, or even an online blog post. Having a public list helps me easily check my reading history from anywhere.

I’ve tracked my reading habits in many places. goodreads, LibraryThing, Google Keep, Google Spreadsheets, Trello, Notion and even local text files but none of them felt right. This custom-built version is my latest and most comprehensive attempt.

I’ve finished most books on the list, only exceptions being ones I stopped but found interesting enough to include. I don’t list works I cannot remember at all. For example, I’ve read many science fiction magazines in high-school but I didn’t go back and add every story from them to this list. There are a couple memorable stories I looked up and put here.

I haven’t found a good database for book length. “Pages” is a common metric, but it only makes sense for one edition of one book and mostly meaningless for ebooks. I want to track at least some sense of length so I save the “pages” listed in goodreads or Google Books.

Timestamps

I track when I finish a book. At one point I marked the date I began as well but I dropped that habit. I don’t consider starting a book as significant as finishing it. Having the beginning date would allow me to calculate how much time it took to read a book, but I don’t think that is a useful metric for me, there are many outside factors that change how much time I have to read in a day, week or month.

I started tracking when I finished a book in around 2015. Consistently doing it since 2018. For books I’ve read before that I had to make some educated guesses. Some books were ordered online, and I used the receipt date from my email inbox as the read date. Not accurate but helps with creating a correct reading order. This is the reason why some books share the same read date. I ordered them at the same time. For some books I remember I bought them as soon as they were released in Hungary so I put their publication year there. I found some titles in my chat history with friends, discussing a book and I used chat timestamps to fill the read date.

Titles

I’ll list the titles in English most of the time but sometimes in the original language. No hard rules here, the page is in English, nowadays I mostly read in English, it makes sense to use English titles. This is not a strict database of books.

Covers

On the covers page for the physical books I’ve read I try to match the cover of the edition I’ve read. For ebooks (most of the books I’ve read) I will pick either a famous cover or a cover I like.

Technology

My reading history is tracked in a JSON file. It was originally created by a small script that combined my LibraryThing and goodreads exports. I use VSCode to edit the file, with the help of a JSON Schema the editor will mark errors.

The page is built with Astro and tailwind CSS. Search and sorting is powered by Alpine.js, hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

If you want to follow my reading through a Feed reader you can! Follow this feed.

Favicon is genereated by https://favicon.io/ from an emoji.

Background image is from Unsplash, link in the footer.

📬 Send me any feedback to bookshelf@janosilles.com