1178.

I realised recently that I had hit over a thousand books on Goodreads: to be precise, I’m at 1178 books (another 800+ are on my want to read list but that’s a whole other existential crisis). I had intended to do something to mark the thousandth book I added to Goodreads but I missed it so here we are, one hundred late but still, a delicious amount of data to get into.

It turns out that my Goodreads account documents over fourteen years worth of reading. Fourteen years! Horrific! (I’ll insert a moment for us all to scream at the passing of time before I continue). (And I’ll insert another little moment for us all to wistfully remember the internet as it used to be back with the dinosaurs and social media sites not being run by absolute.. oh hey, I’m digressing). Anyway!

The first book I reviewed was Room 13 by Robert Swindells (still a banger) and the second was A Dream of Sadlers’ Wells (perfect and also part of a series with the best covers in all of children’s books). Everything was going so well until I got to my third, Swallows and Amazons, which I gave two stars to – the same rating I gave On Chesil Beach which, upon reflection, must have been quite the thought process. In April of that year, I began my review of the Chalet School books which is something I’m yet to fully complete. By the end of the year, the longest book I’d read was Apollo’s Angels : A History of Ballet and the shortest was The Grapes of Wrath.

I first turned to Goodreads because it did the work for me. I had just finished my MA in Children’s Literature and felt somewhat bereft at leaving this world behind. Luckily enough my then employer was offering career coaching classes and so, one evening, I did and the idea of a blog came about. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to be as a writer and even, really, how I might handle this idea of writing in public. Writing in private for a long time had been fine. A safe space. But going public? Being read by unknowns? When your confidence was not particularly high or even indeed middlingly high or even indeed present in the same room? (A challenging thing, she says coyly, a challenging thing).

(This is what I say to my students when I teach them now – I have been there, I know what it’s like to doubt and to question yourself, but now I know the importance of persisting, of giving yourself the value of belief in what you do and how you do it).

Goodreads did drag and drop formatting and that was so handy for me back in the day. I could pilfer the HTML on there to format a post on here and for a long time, I just did that. I learnt eventually about things like how to name your images and how to do alt tags and paragraph breaks and italics and bolds but my early stuff was scrappy at best and I liked how Goodreads held it together and gave me time to figure it out.

My favourite shelf on Goodreads (and one with only one entrant) is my ‘White Sauce’ shelf which features the incomparably ridiculous Chester House Wins Through. I saw mention of it recently elsewhere and was all “wait, that’s the white sauce book” – it’s genuinely the first ever white sauce based japery in a book I think I’ve ever read. I’m also very fond of ‘incomprehensible-yet-pleasant‘ which, rather appropriately, began with Elsie J. Oxenham who is the absolute queen of this.

One of the interesting side effects of documenting your reading like this is that you can see trends. I’m intrigued, for example, that my pandemic shelf only has three titles on it so far – now, I know this isn’t a kind of madly in depth empirical study but I do think that’s interesting. I know I have no inclination to write about it at all myself, at least for the moment, but it’s interesting to me I’m not coming across many more titles about it. Of those titles on that shelf, I would shout out Vy’s Special Gift – it’s a rather outstanding, beautiful, brilliant thing.

Alongside the wider trends in the world, it’s also possible to see trends in yourself. I’m a vastly different person than what I was fourteen years ago and you can see the shift in my reading and my writing. I tend to forget the content of books quite quickly (though I don’t forget the feel of them) and so I’ll quite often find myself reading something, look it up, and realise that I’ve read and reviewed it several years ago. I’ll also find myself writing about something that I’m trying to figure out and realise that I began thinking about it several years ago – in fact, I’m trying to write a paper now on women’s writing and movement and realised upon writing this that I’ve been reading about this for ages.

I’ve been thinking about archiving as well, a lot, and how readers create their own little archives of where they’ve been and what they’ve done with their reading and what their readings have done with them. Reading is a two way street; you give, you get, you take, it pulls. You have to sacrifice a little bit of yourself to it in order to get something back. And how do we capture those moments, how do we document that experience, how do we even begin to archive our own reading, our losses and our wins, our gains and our disappointments? I thought about that and then I thought about my Goodreads account and I wondered if I should delete it sometimes and then I thought, no.

After all, I have a lot of questions to still figure out.