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Managing a To Be Read list
(Making this a rare public post, feel free to aim people who might find it useful or have relevant thoughts here. If you want to comment, see the note at the end...)
So, I have been frustrated for some time [1] by my inability to manage my to be read list in a way that works reliably for me for than about two weeks.
I am not sure if I'm going to get an answer out of this, but I figure pulling the pieces loose might be helpful for me, might be helpful for someone else, and might let me get on with the writing I really ought to be doing tonight.
Also, I am clearly in A Mood, which I am told is sometimes amusing.
1) Skills and knowledge
I do in fact have An Entire Graduate Degree in 'managing books and information', as well as [pause for maths] 21.25 years of experience working in libraries. [2]
This does not make any of this easier, for the record.
On the other hand, it does mean that I have multiple models of approach I can theoretically apply, and am generally familiar with the range of technological options inherent in the system (and perhaps more importantly, how annoying they are to maintain to my personal requirements of data standarisation.)
2) There are some key practical considerations:
a) I mostly read ebooks
b) But also some print
c) Some things I read or might want to read are things I would get from the library (and therefore, timing requests is a thing)
d) my reading comes in a variety of different categories, more anon
3) Any sort of public-facing system is a no-go.
I have a strong aversion to sharing lists of what goes in my brain with other people. (Sharing the occasional book rec, fine. Anything like public shelves, widgets, etc, nope.)
It took me until I was 44 [3] to even start reliably tracking stuff privately. (Fundamentally, I clearly believe that if you know what's inside my head you can steal my soul, and we're not having any of that around here.)
Realistically, I also read extremely eclectically, and for reasons that may not be remotely obvious. And did even before the writing historical romances thing I do (where I'm often diving into a particular quirk of a topic for three months because I can). This makes most broad usage tracking systems a pain to set up and use, even if I wanted to sort that out.
One of the problems I hit reliably is that a system I can structure to be sufficiently nuanced for my personal mental categories (which get pretty refined, especially in witchy/Pagan content) is clunky to use. Some systems wehre I can, for example, tag, don't let me easily flag for priority or "Look at this when you're researching X" use cases.
4) I read a fair bit.
In other words, the system has to manage numbers as well as diversity of content.
I read 131 books last year, so about 10 books a month give or take. This is a lot less than I used to read before the Internet had so much Internet in it. [4]
About a third of that was non-fiction of some form (many years it's closer to half), with a fairly even mix of romance, mystery, and fantasy, and novel-length fanfic on the fiction side with a few other things mixed in.
My current "what did I read" tracking system is a spreadsheet in my One Spreadsheet To Rule Them All for the year. When I finish a book, I add it (author, title, some genre and category stuff, number of pages, which is the only thing that takes me much time to add.) This takes me maybe 5 minutes and is manageable. Longer wouldn't be.
5) I find stuff I might want to read all the time
This does mean that any given day, I might send somewhere between 3 and 10 books to Instapaper to think about and save later. (Maybe also some lists of themed books.)
Friendly reader, I am not going to read all those books.
Even if my "I have already bought this book and haven't read it yet" pile weren't in the hundreds, I would not read all those books.
On the other hand, I will read some of them, and might want to be able to find specific books from that morass of archived bookmarks more easily than I currently do. [5]
6) I take notes on my reading only occasionally
While I read a lot, I only rarely take notes on my reading. Usually, because it's a book I have from the library (especially an ILL book), and I'm not going to be able to refer back to it.
Sometimes it's because we're discussing it in my coven or some other similar situation where there's a gap between me reading it and talking about it (and in the interim I will have dumped a bunch of other stuff in my brain.)
Basically, if I can get access to the book or the facts in the book, I trust my librarian skills and my 'dump all the information in there, it will make the connections' brain will generally find it for me. [6]
GoodReads, LibraryThing, and other 'put this stuff on a bookshelf' tools are either insufficiently private for me, don't have data scaffolding that makes sense in my head without a lot of mental shifts on the fly, or I already manage stuff in an account there and don't want to juggle two.
(Basically, if anyone has posted about a Mac or cloud usable option in the past decade, there's a decent chance I've poked at it.)
I am currently playing with Obsidian for a lot of other information management, and largely a) like it a lot, b) am learning how to do the stuff I want with it, and c) think it might be a solution to one piece of my current issues, but it is not quick data entry because it can't pull the info from known sources usefully. (This is the thing that's nice about GoodReads or LibraryThing or some other options)
If you want to see some of what it can potentially do, based on text files, the Obsidan app overlay, and some commonly used plugins, this guide to creating a bookshelf in Obsidian is part of what got me thinking about new solutions.
I've also played a bit with Zotero (using the browser extension to let me save thigns from wherever I find them - most commonly the Amazon page - and then sorting them into categories from there which I can do by drag and drop.
(Zotero is an academic citations manager, but it is free for moderate amounts of data storage use, and also pretty flexible. However, it obviously doesn't deal as well with non-academic sorts of works.)
Similarly, I use Pinboard for long-term bookmarks, but I've got 138 tags already, it is keeping four different parts of my life in one place, and it's unwieldy to flag (and somewhat unwieldy to browse and search unless my tagging is really nuanced because so much of what is in there uses similar words.) I don't want to create a new account just for books, because swapping logins back and forth is a pain.
I am also using an app called Book Track (Mac and iOS) which I like a lot for keeping tabs on what I already own.
Basically, everything I own and might want to read is in there, I flag a handful of books per tag as "reading" and when I next need to pick a new book, I start there. It helps me keep the stuff I'm most interested in near the surface, even when the reasons for interest are varied. (And the fact that most entries have the blurbs, publishing categories, etc. attached is helpful at times.)
However:
1) This won't work at all for stuff that isn't published yet (without manual data entry). Also doesn't work for fanfic without manual entry.
2) It often takes me multiple tries to hit on a search string that pulls the particular book I want (especially for authors with a ton of books) - this isn't awful, but it's time consuming if I'm entering more than a handful at once.
3) See above about adding a lot of potential books a week, and how that's going to swamp the system pretty fast.
4) The auto categories provided from publisher data are both useful, and a pain to search on, which means I tag everything by categories I actually use in my brain, which adds about six clicks and loading time between screens to putting in a new book.
(Again, not a big deal for 'books I have actually bought' but not sustainable for 'books I might someday be interested in' or 'books I don't want to forget exist'.)
When I started chewing on this problem again over the weekend, I realised that I probably don't want one TBR list. I want multiple. And more importantly, I want to treat the data management of each list differently. They have different timescales, priorities, and 'how much I'm likely to add to them on a regular basis' data entry considerations.
I have, roughly, these categories of reading:
Aspirational's not quite the right word here, but it gets at the container. Things I think I ought to read for some reason (and it's probably a decent reason), but they are complex or detailed or otherwise take a space that I don't have in my routine day to day reading.
(In other words, I need to either slot it into my late afternoon reading time, or make time to treat it as a book I take notes on. Both of these are limited time and energy slots in my life compared to my reading time in total, and more to the point have a lot of competition.)
What's useful: This is definitely one where a tool that let me combine the list of books with annotations would be really handy. (Why do I want to read this thing? who recommended it? What do I want to remember about why I was interested a year from now?)
This is also not a super long category, comparatively. Manual maintenance would be fine.
Books about how to handle something I'm working on in my life - my two big categories here are my "friends with time" (planning, time management, organisation) and "friends with money" (getting my finances in order).
These books are often things where I want to poke at a specific problem (where having a list of books in the category that deal with a range of topics is helpful) but where I'm not going to read more than one or two books about that specific piece of it at once.
What's useful: Maintaining long-term lists, perhaps with annotations, would be really helpful here too. Also not a super long category: manual maintenance would be fine.
I have a lot of things I want to keep an eye on for witchy/coven purposes - books that are coming out, books that cover a topic I might want to spend some time with down the road.
And most importantly, I'd really like a better way to build ongoing bibliographies of "these books deal with this topic", whether or not I've read them (or necessarily intend to read them). It comes up in coven and other conversations often enough it's annoying not to have.
What's useful: This is where I think I want to deploy Zotero directly - it is easy to bookmark, sort, etc. And also easy to produce bibiliography lists, tag for "read" and "not read" and "own" and so on.
If I can keep some of the other reading out of going through Zotero, it would be easier to sort and manage regularly, and to structure folders in a way that's not a pain to manage.
This is the category where I more or less keep up on things, because it's pretty time-contained. I have a good idea what I'm going to be writing next, and 3 months before I start writing it, I start dumping background reading in my head for it.
However, there's some ongoing stuff I want to read relevant to the time periods I write in, stuff I note is coming out in six months, etc. And I'm working very slowly (very very slowly) on background reading for some stuff set in the 15th century.
What's useful: This is a category where more note-taking might actually be handy (certainly for when I write authors notes for the book later...) Obsidian + some tracking method (to flag when to check lists) would be good here.
This category covers both "books about writing and self-publishing" (of which there are quite a few in my lists already) and "books I should read because they're relevant to my writing" (possible comp authors, people doing interesting things in the genre, friends who write nifty books).
This is actually one of the categories I'm worst about tracking and reading, and I'd like whatever tools I pick to fix that.
What's useful: This is one where a way to prioritise reading (stuff that's come out recently? Where I can usefully maybe review? Things that are new and current?) would be really handy. This may call for a spreadsheet: I don't have an absurd number of books in this category, but being able to sort and filter them on multiple factors might be preferable.
This is likely the largest category of my reading, and thus the most sprawling. Random mystery with a quirk! Romance with an interesting premise! That fantasy with an intriguing blurb! Thing that came out thirty years ago but I really want to reread!
What's useful: The tracking here needs to be fast and easy to manage, and assume I'm not going to read most of these books any time soon. However, being able to group by genre (my idea of genres, which does historical mystery vs. contempory, and a couple of categories of fantasy, and romance) is key.
This might be folders in Instapaper where I can drag and drop (which means a limited number of folders), might be Zotero, might be a spreadsheet (but probably not: I want book descriptions handy at a single click.)
Stuff I'd like to read sometime, but there's no time pressure, and probably I need to be in a specific mood for it. Lists of themed books might fit here, for example.
What's useful: Probably the same as Pleasure Reading (with a tag to indicate that it's the eventual category?)
I have some things on hold at the library, some things I can probably get from the library. (And for whatever reason would prefer not to buy. $15 ebooks, I am looking at you.)
What's useful:Being able to track that I've put a hold on something or that it's something I'd prefer to get from the library integrated to one of my other lists would be ideal.
Related to the library reading, it would be handy to note when I've already pre-ordered it, ideally with a clue about when it might appear (both so I can make reading time, and so I am not surprised in my budget.)
What's useful: Whatever list I use for the previous two, plus a note in my end-of-month budget tasks to check the preorder list for the month and see what's there would be smart, self.
Now that I have written that all out, it looks like what I want has three parts.
1) A quick drag and drop dump where I can sort by category I determine, but where I don't need to add much additional data (which will take some processing time on a regular basis, but not much, and processing I can do while watching something, chatting online, etc. - I don't need to open tons of new tabs or do a lot of typing.)
I suspect this is going to be Zotero, but it might be Instapaper folders by genre. For my pleasure reading and eventual reading. (This needs to be sortable by genre/subgenre, ideally.)
2) A folder in Obsidian (with a page set up to display a book list or lists) for my Aspirational and Pragmatic reading, where I can do a page for each book, add notes about it, etc. I can then add other specific books to that as I take notes on them, want to do extended work with them, etc. (like that 15th century project.)
3) Focused reading lists (research, authorial reading, eventual, preorders etc.) Probably both in Zotero (as in #1) and in a spreadsheet so I can surface the pieces I want in a timely way when I need to. (It is possible to drop things out of Zotero and put into a CSV, so I can nearly automate a chunk of that if needed.)
Well, for one thing, it means revamping the Zotero account (probably dumping everything in there into a holding folder, doing some tutorials on how to use it better, and then rearranging.) And also figuring out hwo to set up in Obsidian what I want to.
And then it's going to mean backprocessing through a bunch of my existing data, but that's doable. (I've got some things I want to watch that it will do well with.)
I also should look at my tags and ideally make them consistent (and for fun, let's try for "easy to type") across all relevant systems, including LibraryThing. Which is a whole other post, I have Opinions about taxonomy systems.
So, no immediate "I have the solution!" but some prospects for having a much better system than I currently have. Wow. Many words. Many books. We'll see where this goes!
[1] By 'frustrated for some time', I mean 'about since I realised a "to be read" list was a thing I had', aka about the age of 5.
[2] Yeah, I don't know how I've been doing this for two decades either. But apparently, yes. I got my Master's in Library and Information Science degree in 2007, but I started working in a library in September 2000.
[3] I'm now 46.
[4] A large part of my numbers is I read fast - it's actually how my parents met. A fair portion of my reading is also pleasure reading for the pure joy of it and I don't linger.
[5] Not a spoiler: I do in fact want to be able to find cool stuff I remembered bookmarking a year ago without trawling through hundreds of summaries.
[6] This method of 'dump stuff in brain, extract later' has actually worked pretty well for me historically, except for about 2 years around the time my health crashed in 2009, when it really really didn't. I would in fact like a more reliable backup system for that reason. [7]
[7] If you've read my or other people's comments on CliftonStrengths, my top three are Learner/Intellection/Input, and that comes out for me very strongly in 'place material in brain, stir, produce tasty stew after simmering'.
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So, I have been frustrated for some time [1] by my inability to manage my to be read list in a way that works reliably for me for than about two weeks.
I am not sure if I'm going to get an answer out of this, but I figure pulling the pieces loose might be helpful for me, might be helpful for someone else, and might let me get on with the writing I really ought to be doing tonight.
Also, I am clearly in A Mood, which I am told is sometimes amusing.
Starting premises
1) Skills and knowledge
I do in fact have An Entire Graduate Degree in 'managing books and information', as well as [pause for maths] 21.25 years of experience working in libraries. [2]
This does not make any of this easier, for the record.
On the other hand, it does mean that I have multiple models of approach I can theoretically apply, and am generally familiar with the range of technological options inherent in the system (and perhaps more importantly, how annoying they are to maintain to my personal requirements of data standarisation.)
2) There are some key practical considerations:
a) I mostly read ebooks
b) But also some print
c) Some things I read or might want to read are things I would get from the library (and therefore, timing requests is a thing)
d) my reading comes in a variety of different categories, more anon
3) Any sort of public-facing system is a no-go.
I have a strong aversion to sharing lists of what goes in my brain with other people. (Sharing the occasional book rec, fine. Anything like public shelves, widgets, etc, nope.)
It took me until I was 44 [3] to even start reliably tracking stuff privately. (Fundamentally, I clearly believe that if you know what's inside my head you can steal my soul, and we're not having any of that around here.)
Realistically, I also read extremely eclectically, and for reasons that may not be remotely obvious. And did even before the writing historical romances thing I do (where I'm often diving into a particular quirk of a topic for three months because I can). This makes most broad usage tracking systems a pain to set up and use, even if I wanted to sort that out.
One of the problems I hit reliably is that a system I can structure to be sufficiently nuanced for my personal mental categories (which get pretty refined, especially in witchy/Pagan content) is clunky to use. Some systems wehre I can, for example, tag, don't let me easily flag for priority or "Look at this when you're researching X" use cases.
4) I read a fair bit.
In other words, the system has to manage numbers as well as diversity of content.
I read 131 books last year, so about 10 books a month give or take. This is a lot less than I used to read before the Internet had so much Internet in it. [4]
About a third of that was non-fiction of some form (many years it's closer to half), with a fairly even mix of romance, mystery, and fantasy, and novel-length fanfic on the fiction side with a few other things mixed in.
My current "what did I read" tracking system is a spreadsheet in my One Spreadsheet To Rule Them All for the year. When I finish a book, I add it (author, title, some genre and category stuff, number of pages, which is the only thing that takes me much time to add.) This takes me maybe 5 minutes and is manageable. Longer wouldn't be.
5) I find stuff I might want to read all the time
This does mean that any given day, I might send somewhere between 3 and 10 books to Instapaper to think about and save later. (Maybe also some lists of themed books.)
Friendly reader, I am not going to read all those books.
Even if my "I have already bought this book and haven't read it yet" pile weren't in the hundreds, I would not read all those books.
On the other hand, I will read some of them, and might want to be able to find specific books from that morass of archived bookmarks more easily than I currently do. [5]
6) I take notes on my reading only occasionally
While I read a lot, I only rarely take notes on my reading. Usually, because it's a book I have from the library (especially an ILL book), and I'm not going to be able to refer back to it.
Sometimes it's because we're discussing it in my coven or some other similar situation where there's a gap between me reading it and talking about it (and in the interim I will have dumped a bunch of other stuff in my brain.)
Basically, if I can get access to the book or the facts in the book, I trust my librarian skills and my 'dump all the information in there, it will make the connections' brain will generally find it for me. [6]
Tech tools I've considered
GoodReads, LibraryThing, and other 'put this stuff on a bookshelf' tools are either insufficiently private for me, don't have data scaffolding that makes sense in my head without a lot of mental shifts on the fly, or I already manage stuff in an account there and don't want to juggle two.
(Basically, if anyone has posted about a Mac or cloud usable option in the past decade, there's a decent chance I've poked at it.)
I am currently playing with Obsidian for a lot of other information management, and largely a) like it a lot, b) am learning how to do the stuff I want with it, and c) think it might be a solution to one piece of my current issues, but it is not quick data entry because it can't pull the info from known sources usefully. (This is the thing that's nice about GoodReads or LibraryThing or some other options)
If you want to see some of what it can potentially do, based on text files, the Obsidan app overlay, and some commonly used plugins, this guide to creating a bookshelf in Obsidian is part of what got me thinking about new solutions.
I've also played a bit with Zotero (using the browser extension to let me save thigns from wherever I find them - most commonly the Amazon page - and then sorting them into categories from there which I can do by drag and drop.
(Zotero is an academic citations manager, but it is free for moderate amounts of data storage use, and also pretty flexible. However, it obviously doesn't deal as well with non-academic sorts of works.)
Similarly, I use Pinboard for long-term bookmarks, but I've got 138 tags already, it is keeping four different parts of my life in one place, and it's unwieldy to flag (and somewhat unwieldy to browse and search unless my tagging is really nuanced because so much of what is in there uses similar words.) I don't want to create a new account just for books, because swapping logins back and forth is a pain.
Book Track
I am also using an app called Book Track (Mac and iOS) which I like a lot for keeping tabs on what I already own.
Basically, everything I own and might want to read is in there, I flag a handful of books per tag as "reading" and when I next need to pick a new book, I start there. It helps me keep the stuff I'm most interested in near the surface, even when the reasons for interest are varied. (And the fact that most entries have the blurbs, publishing categories, etc. attached is helpful at times.)
However:
1) This won't work at all for stuff that isn't published yet (without manual data entry). Also doesn't work for fanfic without manual entry.
2) It often takes me multiple tries to hit on a search string that pulls the particular book I want (especially for authors with a ton of books) - this isn't awful, but it's time consuming if I'm entering more than a handful at once.
3) See above about adding a lot of potential books a week, and how that's going to swamp the system pretty fast.
4) The auto categories provided from publisher data are both useful, and a pain to search on, which means I tag everything by categories I actually use in my brain, which adds about six clicks and loading time between screens to putting in a new book.
(Again, not a big deal for 'books I have actually bought' but not sustainable for 'books I might someday be interested in' or 'books I don't want to forget exist'.)
A different approach
When I started chewing on this problem again over the weekend, I realised that I probably don't want one TBR list. I want multiple. And more importantly, I want to treat the data management of each list differently. They have different timescales, priorities, and 'how much I'm likely to add to them on a regular basis' data entry considerations.
I have, roughly, these categories of reading:
Aspirational reading
Aspirational's not quite the right word here, but it gets at the container. Things I think I ought to read for some reason (and it's probably a decent reason), but they are complex or detailed or otherwise take a space that I don't have in my routine day to day reading.
(In other words, I need to either slot it into my late afternoon reading time, or make time to treat it as a book I take notes on. Both of these are limited time and energy slots in my life compared to my reading time in total, and more to the point have a lot of competition.)
What's useful: This is definitely one where a tool that let me combine the list of books with annotations would be really handy. (Why do I want to read this thing? who recommended it? What do I want to remember about why I was interested a year from now?)
This is also not a super long category, comparatively. Manual maintenance would be fine.
Pragmatic reading
Books about how to handle something I'm working on in my life - my two big categories here are my "friends with time" (planning, time management, organisation) and "friends with money" (getting my finances in order).
These books are often things where I want to poke at a specific problem (where having a list of books in the category that deal with a range of topics is helpful) but where I'm not going to read more than one or two books about that specific piece of it at once.
What's useful: Maintaining long-term lists, perhaps with annotations, would be really helpful here too. Also not a super long category: manual maintenance would be fine.
Witchy reading
I have a lot of things I want to keep an eye on for witchy/coven purposes - books that are coming out, books that cover a topic I might want to spend some time with down the road.
And most importantly, I'd really like a better way to build ongoing bibliographies of "these books deal with this topic", whether or not I've read them (or necessarily intend to read them). It comes up in coven and other conversations often enough it's annoying not to have.
What's useful: This is where I think I want to deploy Zotero directly - it is easy to bookmark, sort, etc. And also easy to produce bibiliography lists, tag for "read" and "not read" and "own" and so on.
If I can keep some of the other reading out of going through Zotero, it would be easier to sort and manage regularly, and to structure folders in a way that's not a pain to manage.
Research reading
This is the category where I more or less keep up on things, because it's pretty time-contained. I have a good idea what I'm going to be writing next, and 3 months before I start writing it, I start dumping background reading in my head for it.
However, there's some ongoing stuff I want to read relevant to the time periods I write in, stuff I note is coming out in six months, etc. And I'm working very slowly (very very slowly) on background reading for some stuff set in the 15th century.
What's useful: This is a category where more note-taking might actually be handy (certainly for when I write authors notes for the book later...) Obsidian + some tracking method (to flag when to check lists) would be good here.
Authorial reading
This category covers both "books about writing and self-publishing" (of which there are quite a few in my lists already) and "books I should read because they're relevant to my writing" (possible comp authors, people doing interesting things in the genre, friends who write nifty books).
This is actually one of the categories I'm worst about tracking and reading, and I'd like whatever tools I pick to fix that.
What's useful: This is one where a way to prioritise reading (stuff that's come out recently? Where I can usefully maybe review? Things that are new and current?) would be really handy. This may call for a spreadsheet: I don't have an absurd number of books in this category, but being able to sort and filter them on multiple factors might be preferable.
Pleasure reading (with some time pressure)
This is likely the largest category of my reading, and thus the most sprawling. Random mystery with a quirk! Romance with an interesting premise! That fantasy with an intriguing blurb! Thing that came out thirty years ago but I really want to reread!
What's useful: The tracking here needs to be fast and easy to manage, and assume I'm not going to read most of these books any time soon. However, being able to group by genre (my idea of genres, which does historical mystery vs. contempory, and a couple of categories of fantasy, and romance) is key.
This might be folders in Instapaper where I can drag and drop (which means a limited number of folders), might be Zotero, might be a spreadsheet (but probably not: I want book descriptions handy at a single click.)
Eventual reading
Stuff I'd like to read sometime, but there's no time pressure, and probably I need to be in a specific mood for it. Lists of themed books might fit here, for example.
What's useful: Probably the same as Pleasure Reading (with a tag to indicate that it's the eventual category?)
Library reading
I have some things on hold at the library, some things I can probably get from the library. (And for whatever reason would prefer not to buy. $15 ebooks, I am looking at you.)
What's useful:Being able to track that I've put a hold on something or that it's something I'd prefer to get from the library integrated to one of my other lists would be ideal.
Pre-ordered
Related to the library reading, it would be handy to note when I've already pre-ordered it, ideally with a clue about when it might appear (both so I can make reading time, and so I am not surprised in my budget.)
What's useful: Whatever list I use for the previous two, plus a note in my end-of-month budget tasks to check the preorder list for the month and see what's there would be smart, self.
Some conclusions
Now that I have written that all out, it looks like what I want has three parts.
1) A quick drag and drop dump where I can sort by category I determine, but where I don't need to add much additional data (which will take some processing time on a regular basis, but not much, and processing I can do while watching something, chatting online, etc. - I don't need to open tons of new tabs or do a lot of typing.)
I suspect this is going to be Zotero, but it might be Instapaper folders by genre. For my pleasure reading and eventual reading. (This needs to be sortable by genre/subgenre, ideally.)
2) A folder in Obsidian (with a page set up to display a book list or lists) for my Aspirational and Pragmatic reading, where I can do a page for each book, add notes about it, etc. I can then add other specific books to that as I take notes on them, want to do extended work with them, etc. (like that 15th century project.)
3) Focused reading lists (research, authorial reading, eventual, preorders etc.) Probably both in Zotero (as in #1) and in a spreadsheet so I can surface the pieces I want in a timely way when I need to. (It is possible to drop things out of Zotero and put into a CSV, so I can nearly automate a chunk of that if needed.)
What that means
Well, for one thing, it means revamping the Zotero account (probably dumping everything in there into a holding folder, doing some tutorials on how to use it better, and then rearranging.) And also figuring out hwo to set up in Obsidian what I want to.
And then it's going to mean backprocessing through a bunch of my existing data, but that's doable. (I've got some things I want to watch that it will do well with.)
I also should look at my tags and ideally make them consistent (and for fun, let's try for "easy to type") across all relevant systems, including LibraryThing. Which is a whole other post, I have Opinions about taxonomy systems.
So, no immediate "I have the solution!" but some prospects for having a much better system than I currently have. Wow. Many words. Many books. We'll see where this goes!
Footnotes
[1] By 'frustrated for some time', I mean 'about since I realised a "to be read" list was a thing I had', aka about the age of 5.
[2] Yeah, I don't know how I've been doing this for two decades either. But apparently, yes. I got my Master's in Library and Information Science degree in 2007, but I started working in a library in September 2000.
[3] I'm now 46.
[4] A large part of my numbers is I read fast - it's actually how my parents met. A fair portion of my reading is also pleasure reading for the pure joy of it and I don't linger.
[5] Not a spoiler: I do in fact want to be able to find cool stuff I remembered bookmarking a year ago without trawling through hundreds of summaries.
[6] This method of 'dump stuff in brain, extract later' has actually worked pretty well for me historically, except for about 2 years around the time my health crashed in 2009, when it really really didn't. I would in fact like a more reliable backup system for that reason. [7]
[7] If you've read my or other people's comments on CliftonStrengths, my top three are Learner/Intellection/Input, and that comes out for me very strongly in 'place material in brain, stir, produce tasty stew after simmering'.
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