About

Hi, this website lists the books I've read. "Book" is interpreted loosely, sometimes it is a comic book, sometimes a collection of short stories or just a single short-story. Sometimes it is a blog post published online. I wanted to have a publicly available list, that I can easily pull up anywhere to check my reading log.

I've tracked my reading habits in many places. goodreads, LibraryThing, Google Keep, Google Spreadsheets, Trello, Notion and even local text files but none of them felt right. This custom-built version is my latest and most comprehensive attempt.

I've finished most books on the list, only exceptions being ones I stopped but found interesting enough to include. I don't list works I cannot remember at all. For example, I've read many science fiction magazines in high-school but I didn't go back and add every story from them to this list. There are a couple memorable stories I looked up and put here.

Timestamps

I track when I finish a book. At one point I marked the date I began as well but I dropped that habit. I don't consider starting a book as significant as finishing it. Having the beginning date would allow me to calculate how much time it took to read a book, but I don't think that is a useful metric for me, there are many outside factors that change how much time I have to read in a day, week or month.

I started tracking when I finished a book in around 2015. Consistently doing it since 2018. For books I've read before that I had to make some educated guesses. Some books were ordered online, and I used the receipt date from my email inbox as the read date. Not accurate but helps with creating a correct reading order. This is the reason why some books share the same read date. I ordered them at the same time. For some books I remember I bought them as soon as they were released in Hungary so I put their publication year there. I found some titles in my chat history with friends, discussing a book and I used chat timestamps to fill the read date.

Titles

I'll list the titles in English most of the time but sometimes in the original language. No hard rules here, the page is in English, nowadays I mostly read in English, it makes sense to use English titles. This is not a strict database of books.

"Hidden" metadata.

I haven't found a good database for book length. "Pages" is a common metric, but it makes sense for one edition of one book. I want to track at least some sense of length for them, so in the raw data I track "pages" found in goodreads or google books but this is not currently listed on the site.

Similarly I track "tags" for each book. It can be found in the source code but not in the public page. I use these tags to mark the books I didn't finish.

Technology

I collect my reading history in a JSON file and I use a static page generator to create this website. The JSON was originally created by a small script that combined my LibraryThing and goodreads exports but it is hand edited. I don't rely on any APIs. I use VSCode to edit the file, with the help of a JSON Schema the editor will mark errors.

Page is hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

The page is built with 11ty and tailwind CSS. Search is powered by Alpine.js

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Send me any feedback to bookshelf@janosilles.com