Bookkeeping

I read a lot of books, and because I am both obsessive and forgetful, I’ve been keeping track of all the books I read. Since 2001, my record-keeping method has simply been a composition notebook. I write down the number, the title, author, number of pages, and add any additional commentary using a few different symbols (e.g. a “:)” means I thought the book was funny).

This method, while charming, unfortunately fails in many of the requirements I needed for the log to be useful. I couldn’t search it easily, it was bulky, and I couldn’t access it anywhere/anytime. If I wanted to check if I’d read a book, I would have to flip through pages and pages to hopefully find it, and that was only if I had the book at hand. Also, Past Me wasn’t a super great record keeper. Turns out I skipped a number around 400-odd books in, and my entire numbering system was off by one forever after. So, I decided to take my notebook and put it into a Google spreadsheet. I’ve been at it since yesterday, listening to podcasts while transcribing (thank you to: Reply All, TLDR, Note to Self, The Memory Palace, and my new fave, Lore). I’m about halfway through right now.

Going through it has been interesting. I don’t typically journal, so this is the closest thing I have to understanding my thoughts and feelings of Past Me. For example, for books I like, I write a star next to their number. But while I was transcribing, I came across books that I love, that have been formative texts for me–like, I reference them, recommend them, talk about them, even years after I’ve read them–that I didn’t star. I didn’t give a star to Sense and Sensibility, or to Loot?  And then there are the books that I did star at the time, and actively mock now (I gave a star to The Two Towers, a book I’ve consistently described as “Frodo and Sam walk to Mordor in real time”).

I considered whether, now that I know how important or good these books are (or aren’t), if I should revise the star rating. But I decided against it: it’s a record of who I was at the time, and understanding that my opinions of books changed is valuable to me. So I’ve transcribed it exactly as it appears in my notebook.

It’s also been great to remember these books and what prompted me to read them. There are the required texts for my American Art and Architecture class in college. There was that time I decided to burn through the collection of Dover Shakespeare plays I had sitting in my room since forever. Here’s when I studied abroad in Bath, England and suddenly decided I should give Jane Austen a try, and then read all of them.

The one thing I will miss about the notebook is seeing my handwriting change. With the spreadsheet, the progression of time seems muted, because the text is uniform and a bit lifeless. After spending so much time with it, I think I may not want to give up the notebook just yet…