One of my favourite things is collecting and organising information. When it comes to my books, this is no different.

There’s so many options out there for reading tracking and believe me, I’ve tried a lot of them. Over the years I’ve managed to find a few that I prefer and I found some apps that I’ll never go near again.

I’ve pretty much always logged my reading and I feel like I’d miss it if I stopped now, but I do know that not everyone likes to track their reading.

Why I Track My Reading

I feel like everyone would have slightly different answers if you asked them why they like to track their reading. For me, tracking my reading allows me to see my progress and understand my reading habits.

I’ve gone through phases of my life where reading is one of my favourite hobbies, but I’ve also gone through phases where I don’t read for months. I even went through a year long reading slump which was awful. Since my reading habits can fluctuate, I like to see when I’m reading more or less. This means that I can maybe find the reason I ended up reading less and hopefully I can prevent it from happening again.

Another reason that I love to track my reading is because it’s a great way to find my favourite genres. I feel like it’s pretty easy to tell someone your favourite book genre without tracking but when you do track, you might find a genre that you didn’t think you would enjoy but ended up loving. From this, you’ll be able to find a whole bunch of new books that you could enjoy but never considered before.

There’s so many great reasons to track your reading but everyone has a different reason for it.

How I Track My Reading

I have two main ways that I track my reading and a couple of others that I use occasionally.

My main ways of tracking:

Goodreads. This is probably the most popular way of tracking books and reading. There’s some things I absolutely love about Goodreads but sometimes I feel like it’s lacking on some areas too. It’s super simple to find the book you’re currently reading and update the progress of your reading. You can then log all the books you’ve completed. One of my favourite things about Goodreads is the yearly reading challenges. At the start of the year, you can set a reading goal and then you see your progress throughout the year.

Spreadsheets. This is my second favourite way of tracking my reading. I sort of use spreadsheets as a Goodreads backup and I also use it to add the data that Goodreads isn’t so good at displaying. There’s so many different reading spreadsheets out there so I won’t bore you with mine too much (but if you do want to see how I track my reading in a spreadsheet then let me know) but making a spreadsheet can be great for tracking your reading data in the best way for you. Spreadsheets are a great way of making your reading tracker much more personal. You can make it as detailed and fancy or as simple and easy as you’d like.

The honourable mentions:

As I mentioned, there’s a couple of ways that you can track your reading that I don’t use all the time but I do like to use occasionally.

StoryGraph. I think that this website is relatively new but I heard some of my favourite youtubers chatting about it and I figured that I’d check it out. My favourite thing about Storygraph is that you can get a whole bunch of reading data. It displays things such as page counts in books, genres, moods, pace and whether what you read is more fiction or non-fiction. The stats page on StoryGraph is my absolute favourite.

Notebooks. Sometimes nothing beats pen and paper. Making a note of all the books that you’ve read can be quite fun and you can make it as detailed or simple as you like. You can add colours, drawings, charts, and so much more. It is also a nice mindful activity to sit with a notebook and track your reading. Only downside is it might take longer than tracking digitally.

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So, now you know why I track my reading and how I do it. I would love to hear whether or not you track your reading? How do you track all the books you’ve read? Let me know in the comments or chat to me on twitter!