Reading

I’m a book lover, sci-fi writer, and native plant nerd. Learn more about me, and see what I’m up to now. This is my personal site — you may be looking for my professional sustainability consulting services. Explore my site Join me in pondering my big questions (my approach to organizing my learning and thinking…

I’m a sci-fi writer, graphic designer and urbanist in the Seattle suburbs. Reading and blogging are my favorite pasttimes and I’m an advocate of the indie web. On this site, I track what I read and watch, write commentary on things that interest me, and collect reference information. I’m curious about everything from technology to…

Replied to IndieWeb Pop-Up: Personal Libraries (indieweb.org)

Personal Libraries is a IndieWebCamp Pop-ups 2022 session focused on the design and use of personal websites with relation to displaying one’s books online, status updates about reading, and generally talking about books in a Goodreads-like social media manner.

When we log reads and write reviews on our personal websites instead of silos, how can we meet others who’ve read the same books and find out what books our network is reading?
Notes and thoughts from the IndieWeb Pop-Up “Personal Libraries”

Sharing what we’re reading and finding other readers online
From session facilitated by Maggie Appleton
2 different discovery challenges:

get recommendations from people you trust / see what people in your network are reading
find people to talk about the books you’re reading with

Various types of collective commentary and discussion:

“slow read” – asynchronous co-reading
shared doc for group commentary or annotation
combination – live event with shared doc that’s either open before the event to start highlighting things for discussion or afterwards for people to add on more thoughts

Key question: are people interested in discussing books for the social aspect or for learning? (May be a distinguishing feature between fiction and non-fiction readers)
Tummler = someone (paid) who gets audience members to participate (because no one wants to be the first one on the dance floor) –> online groups and communities can benefit from someone serving this role — social ‘lubricant’ and initiator
BookWyrm could be a platform for connecting with other readers
Posting our reading data to facilitate connection
If we’re going to aggregate reading data from personal websites, it needs to be in a useful format. I went through my current year reading list and added microformats for ‘p-author’ (I had p-title already) and ‘h-cite book’ as a class to the div. I briefly considered tagging my reviews h-review but I’m not sure how to do that in WordPress and not sure how valuable it is to bother figuring out. I can’t be fussed to include ISBN / ASIN — with a manual process there’s a limit to the amount of data I’m willing to look up and port over.
Some things I’m planning to adjust about my reading logs:

post on micro.blog when I start reading something
add a started reading date on my currently reading list
hotlink book cover from Open Library (heck, if they want to give their blessing for hotlinking I’ll save myself the storage)
consider linking to book on Open Library instead of Goodreads for reviews
take a photo of books I read on paper

Added 2/26/22:
I like Maggie Appleton’s suggestion of starting with our antilibraries as a way to share what books we’re interested in reading so others can find people to read along with. I haven’t been happy with my want to read page, so I’m going to rethink the format and whether I can make it more useful. I think there’s also consideration to the kinds of books I’d like to discuss with others: nonfiction or fiction or both? I’m not into literary analysis / book group kind of questions but do like discussing what I liked and didn’t like about a novel, thinking about craft and storytelling and worldbuilding.
I quickly looked into WordPress Open Library plugins and didn’t really see anything quite right. I might try out WP Books Gallery although I’m not sure adding everything manually to a plugin is a big improvement to adding everything manually to a page.

Replied to 8 Ways to Read a Lot More Books (hbr.org)

I read a lot of books. I agree with several of this author’s suggestions for reading more*:

Quit more books, earlier
Make your space comfortable for reading, and set it up to encourage you to read books over other activities
Always be bringing in new books and cycling out others
Track your reading

But I think he forgot an important thing: you should read books you actually enjoy. Reading will become much easier when you recognize that not everyone’s reading tastes will match yours — even your family and friends. Just because someone recommends a book directly to you doesn’t mean you’ll like it, or even that you have to try it. Just because a book is on a “best of” list doesn’t mean it’ll be meaningful to you.
Don’t treat reading as a chore, the brain equivalent of eating your spinach. Honor your own interests and read at whim, for pleasure. That means you need to learn to know yourself as a reader. The more you read, the better you’ll learn your own tastes, so you can choose books you’ll enjoy in the future and feel confident about quitting books you don’t.
*And if if turns out you’re actually not that into books as a storytelling medium, that’s totally fine too! There is nothing inherently virtuous about reading books versus watching video or listening to podcasts. If what you’re worried about is your ability to pay attention to long-form storytelling, you don’t have to win back your attention through books.

My TBR shelf of non-fiction I’ve bought — I don’t color code any of my other shelves but I like that this stack…