Just a short thought on how I record what I read, recent changes to that system, and some potential avenues.
I made a point of recording everything I read before graduate school, but as my reading fell off a cliff, I fell out of that habit. When I returned to reading beyond my immediate academic needs, which, not coincidentally, was the same semester I took my comprehensive exams in 2013, I resumed the habit of recording what I read, starting a google doc with a simple list: date, author, title. Recently, I wanted to start digging a little bit more, and have started recording some additional data that correspond with some goals I have related to my reading. The list now includes the same information as before, but also a list of the original languages of the books and a tally of female authors, awards the books won, and, broadly speaking, the genre. Based on this information, I started compiling a spreadsheet that charts my reading by month and (annually) in certain specific categories.
I am now wondering, though, whether tallying my reading by the book is granular enough. I tend to read a lot of really long books, none longer than War and Peace, which I worked through last year, which necessarily cuts into the total number of books I read in a year. As a result, I am toying with the idea of also recording the number of pages in the books completed in a month in order to get a better picture of how much I am reading in a given month. There are of course problems with this, not least of which the logical extreme would be to demand a way to record every word read, which is an absurdist impossibility. I do want a way to give credit for reading longer books, particularly now that I am both aching and mentally bracing to reading Infinite Jest. So, I am curious: has anyone tried charting books this way?
Related to all of this is how I keep tabs of the academic books I read. My relationship to academic work is a topic for another post that I am delaying because my magic eight ball keeps responding with “try again later,” but, in general, falls into two categories: “this is relevant to my work” and “this looks interesting.” I take copious notes (on the same system I developed for myself when I was taking my comprehensive exams), but now with an eye towards things like teaching and potential research projects. Inspired by other folks online, one of the things I would like to do is to become more organized about how I approach academic reading and also to branch out in terms of whose work I read, prioritizing younger and more diverse voices. The other reason I want to start recording this information is to become more aware of exactly how much academic reading I do. The answer is usually a lot, but I also know that it has tailed off this semester since I have been preoccupied with applications, editing my dissertation, and teaching. Most of those things are behind me now and there is no time like the present to get more organized.
Noodlings 