Keeping track of the books, the author, or the genre is a hefty task when left on any human brain when the volume of them is as vast as ours. The solution? Book tracking. Here, I am going to discuss book tracking and its benefits.
The world of literature divides itself into two proportions, that is, the fun readers who read to lighten their brain after a tough day’s work and the diligent ones who do it just because they cannot fathom a world where they don’t have an unfinished book at any point in their life. Whether you belong to the former or the latter, at some point or the other, there must have been someone who has asked you about a book recommendation, and you may have gone blank at that moment.
What is Book Tracking and Its Benefits
Book tracking is the process of keeping track of the books that you have read in the past, are currently reading, and want to read in the future. You can do it manually by keeping a record in a notebook, writing a note on your phone, or using one of the many book-tracking apps available these days.
Benefits of Book Tracking
Being a college student is mostly about being stuck in a reality you don’t like, and reading is my favorite escape. Keeping track of all the books is a habit you want to get into. Since I started keeping track of the books, I noticed the high variation in my habits and tastes. Below are some of the benefits I encountered after cataloging my reads.
Encourage Yourself to Read More
To kick off, let’s take the most obvious one. No one likes a long list of pending tasks just staring in your face. That nagging feeling at the back of your brain is hard to satiate. Keeping a record of the books you have left unfinished or are still about to read will push you into being a better reader. Setting up monthly goals will chew up your “free time,” sure, but that feeling of closing that last page is yet to find an equal.
Rediscovering Past Love
As much of a red flag as the title sounds, it sure is a good habit for literature. Remembering a book you have read in the past year or so isn’t too problematic. Still, if you are like me, who has been reading ever since you could put sentences together, it’s a bit taxing to recollect all the books that you have read in half a decade or so without missing one or two small books that probably didn’t as huge of an impact as the others. When fiction is your forte, the number of authors that stand out is enormous.
When skimming through your list, you might one day find a series that was all you could talk about once, but now even the title sounds blurry. If you loved something once, it deserves some space in the present. After all, you wouldn’t be you if not for every obstacle you overcame.
For a long while, even when recommending something to one of my non-bibliophile friends, all I could come up with were my favorites which I read through my early teens. Being stuck on one suggestion isn’t very helpful when one has a vast library like ours to flaunt.
Book Tracking Apps
Book journals have been around for decades now. But in today’s fast, ever-growing world where most of the knowledge is available at the touch of your finger, journals are a lost art form. Keeping track of a hobby in a notebook when our generation doesn’t want to keep track of the notes in lectures is probably a foreign idea. The easiest way out of this problem lies with the idiot box in your pocket – the book tracking apps. With the market flooding with new issues and their solutions every minute, it’s no wonder the IT field has a solution for this too.
The popular book tracking apps offer you a variety of resources for almost any need your mind can come up with. Some of the popular apps include “Goodreads,” “bookshelf,” and my personal favorite, “Etsy.”
1. Goodreads
Even if you have thought of reading as a hobby, you must have heard about this one. Goodreads has been the website for bookworms for over a decade now, with a massive database of books and lets you keep track of them too, which is now available as an app.
2. Bookshelf
Bookshelf is a book-tracking app that helps users build a digital library, motivates them to read more, and meets their reading goals.
3. Litsy
“Litsy,” The unholy child of Goodreads and Instagram, allows you to share “the bookish moments” with your friends. Everything from a photo to a favorite quote from a book.
Conclusion| Book Tracking and Its Benefits
Journaling your reads might help you find biases that you might have never expected in yourself. It certainly did for me. When I started keeping track of all my past books, I noticed that 90% of my books are adventurous fiction novels. I had drastically neglected the other genres. It’s not necessarily a pattern that everyone wants to break.
Residing in your comfort zone is something that I get. But my horizon grew once I consciously tried to read something from the other genres. There are just so many viewpoints and forms of writing that often go unexplored.
You should try out new areas to know what you don’t want, and you may stumble upon a fantastic find that you might have otherwise missed.
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