Christa's 2021 Reading Stuff

[Christa, The Renewed]

I'm trying to import just my read books into LibraryThing because I want to play around with their new Charts & Graphs features. It's... not going smoothly. LOL I did my GR export, removed all unread books from the csv and exported it, but some of the fields aren't carrying over correctly even when I change the headers to match what LT uses. I'm on my third attempt now.

Most of the stuff is easy enough to change once it's in LT but it's way easier to do it in the csv first. Oh well. It's currently working on my latest attempt and things look better this time (at least the ratings and date read are now being correctly imported).

[Christa, The Renewed]

Updated books. August looks really good but most of those were short stories from the Amazon monthly collection.

Gave up on trying to make LT work for me and ended up making a spreadsheet instead. Probably won't do much with it though because keeping up manually doesn't interest me.

Went to the emergency room last Sunday. They diagnosed me with anxiety after not examining me. Did a CBC, UA, BMP along with a Troponin test to rule out a heart attack. Didn't even do a Covid test. Still not sure what is wrong with me but I seem to be getting better slowly. I know that it isn't anxiety. But I've been in bed a fair amount so I've been reading a bit more, that's something I guess.

[Bianca]

I hope you feel better soon.

[Christa, The Renewed]

Bianca wrote: "I hope you feel better soon."

Thank you! :)

[HomeInMyShoes]

Hope you're feeling better.

I've got a ridiculous spreadsheet of my reading here. I've got it in google sheets so I could show you that if you want. But, if I recall correctly, you've got enough spreadsheet skills to probably run circles around me. All I enter is information on one sheet for the books I read. I just enter the following: [continent] [region] [country] [title] [author] [pages] [ebook indicator] [year] [genre] [subgenre]

I'm sure I could simplify this to not needing the region or continent. Mine is slanted to keeping stats on regions and countries. I just enter the books on one sheet and it keeps everything else up to date. So when someone asks me how many pages I've read from South-East Asia, I can tell them: 4,630 over 16 books. You know, the really useful stuff.

I've given up on other people's tools and I enter books here and then my spreadsheet and world map. That's enough geekiness for me.

[Christa, The Renewed]

I've got separate tabs for each year, so I'd only be entering the info on one sheet now that that's done. I pared down the data from GR to: [title] [author] [rating] [publisher] [format] [pages] [orig pub year] [date finished] [source] [price]

I kind of want to add some additional data but as I learned from adding source / price, I'll be wanting to backfill the info for the past 10 years. LOL Going forward is one thing, the existing 550 or so books is another.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Lol, backfilling data is tedious, but just treat it as something you do when you have the energy for it. Eventually it disappears.

I had sheets for each year, but that made consolidating information tedious. Much better to have one tab for all the books and then create a tab to run a query against for the year you are caring about. Google Sheets has a QUERY function that makes that kind of thing pretty easy, once you figure out what you want to look at.

[Christa, The Renewed]

LOL Here it is, Oct 7, and I looked at those last posts and thought, "Oh shit, the spreadsheet. Where did I put that...?" That tells you how well I've kept up with it. :D

Updated my books for Sept-Oct so far.

Also updated my challenge so I get to beat it twice in one year. LOL

[Christa, The Renewed]

Updated for the last few books. Also, completed my challenge, again. I originally set it for 52, then I changed it to 15, hit 15 and changed it to 40 which I just hit. LOL I might still hit 52, but I've spend a lot of time reading books I ended up DNFing this year so I'm not counting on it. So I'll leave the challenge as completed at 40.

[Bianca]

Congratulations!

[Christa, The Renewed]

Bianca wrote: "Congratulations!"

Thanks! :D

[HomeInMyShoes]

Congratulations on finishing.

[Christa, The Renewed]

HomeInMyShoes wrote: "Congratulations on finishing."

Thanks!

40 was a good number. I think I'll set the same goal next year.

[Christa, The Renewed]

How the fuck is it December already? How did that happen? LOL They say time flies when you're having fun but it apparently also flies when you're not having fun.

Updated covers post with my last few books. I'll start setting up the 2022 discussion folder and stuff soon.

[Christa, The Renewed]

Checking in from my Florida Christmas vacation...

Well, the book I started last night is over 500 pages, so I think I can safely say that 2021 is a wrap because I really don't think I'm going to get that done before midnight on the 31st.

Overall, I'm quite happy with my reading this year. A lot of false starts, but I've finally learned to let go of a book that isn't doing it for me, and I think that's a good thing.