Rob’s Comments (group member since Jul 06, 2012)

Rob’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

Trike wrote: "For a sec I pictured rotating spectacles."

haha

I rotate my glasses too!

Iain wrote: "I only ever buy books that I will read. "

I applaud your self control. I buy so many books that I hear are good, or from an author I've wanted to check out and only ever get around to reading about 1/4 of them it seems.

Like I just bought the 3 Binti novellas this morning. I at least refrained from paying for the audio upgrades until I've decided I'm going to actually listen to them in audio instead of reading the ebooks (which is a higher likeliness of actually getting read).

Trike wrote: "I once felt really bad for the towels at the bottom of the pile in the linen closet, because they almost never got used, so never got to fulfill their purpose in life."

This is why I rotate my towels! Old ones move to the left, newly washed ones shelved to the right. This way I use every towel once before using the others again.

The Binti Novellas are all on sale for $2 today:

Binti - https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00Y7RWXHU/

Home - https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01EROMI1S/

The Night Masquerade - https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B06WPBWQMM/

The first one comes with a pretty cheap ($5) upgrade to audio too. The others are more expensive at $7.50, but 9.50 is still cheaper than an audible credit (or close if you're on the 24/year plan)

Netflix is making a show based on Shadow and Bone / Six of Crows

https://nerdist.com/leigh-bardugos-sh...

Jan jr. wrote: "Do I understand right that there is no way in the GR interface to opt out of receiving these messages (through the GR system, I am not talking about forwarding to e-mails) except leaving the group?..."

Not that I'm aware of. As someone previously mentioned however you can prevent it from emailing you when you get the message.

I think that setting is for all Goodread's messages though, not on a group by group basis. Check Under your Account's Email settings.

Ooh. I just looked at the data and there is a field for purchase date and purchase location. Unfortunately I typically only fill that information in after I finish reading it/while I'm writing my review.

So all I need to do if go through my 145+ books on my owned and unread shelf and add in the purchase details >.<

That should be a fun weekend project!

I totally forgot that goodread let's you track books you own with a purchase date. I don't recall if that's included in the csv export I use though.

If not, the easiest workaround I can think of is creating shelves like "owned-2019" etc.

If I did that, I could get rid my owned-backlog shelf and use it for the same purpose. I would require trying to figure out when I bought hundreds of books though, and a bunch more shelves.

Needless to say I am considering it.

One of my main goals lately has been to read down my "owned-and-unread" shelf. So in that vein, I created a "owned-backlog" which lets me tag books I've read as having come from my backlog so I can see how well I'm doing.

I apparently did about 26% of my books last year from my backlog. Most of them in audio. I set it up so I have stats going back to 2012 (thanks to my handy Goodreads app)

The one thing it doesn't show me though is how many books I'm adding to that backlog every year. For me I'm considering anything a backlog book if I owned it for more than a month before I started reading it.

So some of my backlog books are short lived. Others have been there for years though.

I wish they gave me the metadata on when I tagged a shelf as "owned-and-unread" then I could generate those numbers. The closest I have is the date added, but often times I add a book to my read pile long before I catch a sale on it.

Anyways here's what my App spit out after I added this feature (and went back through the last 6 years of books to fix my shelves). The formatting doesn't look to be very good on here.

Backlog Counts:

Year Total Read Backlog Read Backlog Books Backlog Audio
---------------------------------------------------------------------
2012 36 1 (2.78%) 1 (2.78%) 0 (0.00%)
2013 107 7 (6.54%) 3 (2.80%) 4 (3.74%)
2014 134 3 (2.24%) 1 (0.75%) 2 (1.49%)
2015 109 12 (11.01%) 8 (7.34%) 4 (3.67%)
2016 90 16 (17.78%) 11 (12.22%) 5 (5.56%)
2017 81 11 (13.58%) 3 (3.70%) 8 (9.88%)
2018 101 26 (25.74%) 7 (6.93%) 19 (18.81%)

Mark wrote: "The Goodreads rules have plenty of wiggle room for adding short stories and nearly every short I've read over the past couple of years has a Goodreads entry. "

That's good to know. I don't really read short stories so I wasn't aware there were issues with them until David brought it up.

Adelaide wrote: "Does genre matter for the graphic novel/comic challenge, or does anything count?"

I was thinking about that this morning as well. I got a free copy of Giant Days, Vol. 1 that I'm planning to read soon, and had already shelved it for the challenge, but it doesn't look to be genre fiction so I was going to remove it.

I could go either way on the genre requirement. As Trike said that's the intention of the group, but since these are group challenges we don't necessarily have to "stay in our lane" and could just simplify it as any Graphic Novel/Comic/Manga.

OK. I created the FAQ in the original post. Please look it over and let me know if something is missing/wrong. As additional questions come up over the year, I'll try to add them.

Catching up on my backlog of reviews from the last month or so. I wasn't too compelled the write any while I was traveling and celebrating the holidays

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr- ★★½☆ - (My Review)

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution- ★★★★☆ - (My Review)

House of Blades- ★★★☆ - (My Review)

Watership Down- ★★★★☆ - (My Review)

Artificial Condition- ★★★★☆ - (My Review)

My big issue is I shelves books that don't count, like comics on my fantasy shelf, so I still need separate shelves for the challenges anyways.

Joanna wrote: "I did rename last year challenge shelves removing the year part. I’m pretty sure I did not think to update the challenges, but I just checked them and they are still accurate."

Good to know!

The name matters because each challenge is associated with a shelf by name. If she deletes the shelf associated with her 2018 challenge or renames it, most likely the books that were being counted towards the challenge will be lost.

What I'm not sure of is if she can update the 2018 challenge to point to the new shelf, or less likely if renaming the shelf would update her 2018 challenge automatically.

Tina wrote: "I want to either delete my 2018 S&L shelves or rename them to 2019 shelves. Will it mess up the S&L stats for 2018 if I do that?"

Maybe? I did it before the 2018 challenge ended, and I had to update the shelves. I didnt pay much attention to what that did to the challenge in the meantime.

Linnea wrote: "but I'm currently reading through a lot of golden age comics, many of which have never been released in collections of any kind, only in their original individual issue form."

Hmm. That's a good question. I kind of like the every 5 comics idea myself.

I don't really have a good alternative to propose.

In some ways it could be easier if we simply made the challenge focus on issues, but then I suspect a lot of people would be forced to shelve issues when they read trades.

Personally I don't want to clutter up my shelves with individual issues just for the sake of this challenge, so I would still just count each trade as 1 rather than 5. I do everything based on the collected trades. However I read very few comics compared to some of you guys, so maybe I'm in a minority?

I'm open to changing things if it's easier for the majority of participants though.

The bottom line is that the challenge rules are simply meant as guidelines. The challenges are meant to be fun. I'm not going to police people's contributions. If you mess up and count every 4, or just decide to count every issue, I'm not going to stop/scold you.

Anne wrote: "LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO"

Sorry. (Not Sorry)