5 Reasons I Love Goodreads (and One I Don’t)

For those of you who don’t know anything about Goodreads, think of it as the Facebook for book dorks. The site has millions of active members, dedicated to reading — and, many, writing as well. You can add your dorky friends, share what you’re reading — you can see my Goodreads feed and visit my shelf from the sidebar to the right — and see which books are popular among equally nerdy people as yourself. It’s all pretty great, if reading books is your thing. Or, at least, one of your things. And, as someone who falls into that group, here are 5 reasons I love Goodreads (as a reader), along with an extra reason that I don’t.

1. Recommendations
   I’m the kind of person who reads/writes one thing at a time, quite possibly due to a lack of brain power. I’ll leave that determination up to you. But when I’m reading a book, I generally read it straight through and don’t jump from book to book until I’m done. That is, unless I think the book sucks, in which case I may just toss it out the window and start a different one. Life’s too short to be bored. But once I’m done, I’m immediately onto something new. There will be no days without reading, if I can help it. So, Goodreads’ Recommendations are pretty helpful. Once you tell Goodreads what you’ve read, you can go to the Recommendations tab and scroll to the bottom to get its recs on what you’ll like based upon what you’ve already read.
2. Seeing Your Friends’ Books
   Reading is such a personal, solitary thing that people don’t necessarily share with everyone, so I always find it interesting to get a peek into what my friends are reading through Goodreads. It syncs in with your friends on Facebook, and you can add who you want. Then, in your Home feed, you’ll get all sorts of updates, from your friends adding new friends to new recommendations and book updates from your friends. Right now, I see friends of mine rated Mindy Kaling’s new book (OK, probably not for me), The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, among many others. Sometimes, I get ideas for what to read next from here. Other times, I just catch a glimpse into my friends’ worlds I might not otherwise, and that’s kinda cool, even when they’re reading a book called Choke Hold.
3. Author Pages
   Once you actually publish a book, you can claim your own author page. There, you can see some basic info about the author, along with a spot to ask questions, a rundown of his or her books (along with their ratings), blog feed, events, and then any other updates the author wants to share, from the books they’re reading to the reviews and pages they’ve Liked. With a smaller author, you have a real chance to directly interact there, seeing which books inspire them and probing them with questions. While an established author like Stephen King’s page might not give you quite the same interactivity potential, it does give you some glimpse into what he enjoys. If he calls Doing Harm by Kelly Parsons “the best damn medical thriller I’ve read in 25 years,” does that mean I’m gonna add it to my To-Read list? Uh-huh. And, of course, I’ll eventually get my own author page, adding one more tower to my ever-growing book-marketing castle.
4. The App
   I can’t speak for all you Droid users, but the Goodreads iPhone app is terrific. It’s what I use most often. Very easy to use. Everything I want access to is right there in front of me. It’s clean, loads quickly, and allows me to casually browse my account from anywhere. Another cool feature is I can scan the bar code on a book to put it on my shelf as Reading or To-Read or whatever. It’s a good shortcut for those who are feeling too lazy to type at that moment.
5. Tracking My Own Books
   Not entirely sure why, I but get a lot of enjoyment out of tracking it as I read a book. As you enter which page you’re on (or percentage you’ve completed), a bar fills from left to right. Once you’re done, you get to click “I’ve finished this book” and it brings up the book’s Goodreads page, where you can rate it, review it, or just stare admiringly at the cover art for a few hours. It’s like a digital progress report. And you can then go back and review all the books you’ve knocked out in the previous months and years. Forget the name of that one book you read on that beach trip in June? It’s there.

And now, for the one thing I don’t like …

1. The Annual Reading Challenge
   This has been a thing on Goodreads (and elsewhere) for a number of years now: You set a goal for the number of books you’ll read in the coming year. In this case, Goodreads will track it for you, and it creates a page for this each year. Lots of people enjoy it, and to each his own. But, for me, not only do I not want to rush through books for the sake of putting another notch in my belt (Of course I put a notch in my belt for every book I read. Don’t you?), but I also don’t want to start choosing — or not choosing, as the case may be — books based upon how long it’ll take me to read them. Pick up “Infinite Jest,” for instance, and you might as well just shoot your 2016 Reading Challenge goal in the face right now. That thing’s a bear, and it’ll either set you back weeks, or you’ll never understand what the hell you just read if you try to skim through it just to say you did it. I’d rather read books because I think I’ll enjoy them, or that I’ll get something out of them, than that they’ll help me meet some arbitrary goal I set back in December/January. I’m gonna be reading every day. No need to set more goals than that.