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Dazrin · 12-10-2015, 06:19 PM

I habitually keep track of many different reading stats, such as pages/book, words/book, start and finish dates, publication date, genre, whether an author is new or the book is a re-read, cost, etc. Tracking this type of information has become part of the fun of reading for me since I started, and I wish I had started many years earlier. I also use some of what I track to guide some of my reading. For example, if I feel I am re-reading too many books I will intentionally read something new. Or if I am only reading authors I am familiar with I will search out someone new.

I was looking today to see what others track as they read and came across a few I hadn't thought about: author gender, author nationality/ethnicity, and protagonist gender/nationality/ethnicity. One person even included LGBT as a tracked statistic. Apparently these stats are used to make sure they are reading a diverse selection of books. I have always considered reading diversity more from a genre perspective, that is, I read a lot of fantasy books and very few non-fiction books so more diverse to me means reading more non-fiction and less fantasy.

So, in an attempt to understand just how far to the side of the "book tracking" bell curve I am, some questions:

Do you track your reading?
Where/how do you do that? In the challenge threads here, in Calibre, on Goodreads, a journal, elsewhere?
What do you track? Just title/author or do you know the exact edition of every book you have read back through 1993 including how many reading sessions it took to read each book?
(How) does what you track affect what you read?
How do you define "diversity" with respect to what you read?

12-10-2015, 06:19 PM	#1
Dazrin Wizard Posts: 2,730 Karma: 75825105 Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: PDXish Device: Kindle Voyage, various Android devices	What do you track while reading? I habitually keep track of many different reading stats, such as pages/book, words/book, start and finish dates, publication date, genre, whether an author is new or the book is a re-read, cost, etc. Tracking this type of information has become part of the fun of reading for me since I started, and I wish I had started many years earlier. I also use some of what I track to guide some of my reading. For example, if I feel I am re-reading too many books I will intentionally read something new. Or if I am only reading authors I am familiar with I will search out someone new. I was looking today to see what others track as they read and came across a few I hadn't thought about: author gender, author nationality/ethnicity, and protagonist gender/nationality/ethnicity. One person even included LGBT as a tracked statistic. Apparently these stats are used to make sure they are reading a diverse selection of books. I have always considered reading diversity more from a genre perspective, that is, I read a lot of fantasy books and very few non-fiction books so more diverse to me means reading more non-fiction and less fantasy. So, in an attempt to understand just how far to the side of the "book tracking" bell curve I am, some questions: Do you track your reading? Where/how do you do that? In the challenge threads here, in Calibre, on Goodreads, a journal, elsewhere? What do you track? Just title/author or do you know the exact edition of every book you have read back through 1993 including how many reading sessions it took to read each book? (How) does what you track affect what you read? How do you define "diversity" with respect to what you read?