I first saw this on my fellow blogger, Dave’s excellent blog, EspressoCoco and he had got it from the also brilliant, Womble of Run Along the Shelves. Links to their tags are here  and here

I believe that it was started by Headless Books, but I can’t find a link that works to them! So here I go:

 

Do you keep a list of the books you have read?

I do keep a track of all the books that I have read since 2002 and have an incomplete list of books from before then. I keep this in two places, Good Reads (You can find me here) and on a spreadsheet, there is a link to that here. I used to have them in separate documents and found it was easier to keep them all together as you can then extract lots of stats and data.

 

If you record statistics, what statistics do you record?

All sorts of things!

Number of books read in total per year

Number of books read in total per month

Number of pages read

Total number of male authors

Total number of female authors

Genres

Publishers

And so on.

My stats for 2019 are here

 

Do you give star ratings for books, and if so, what do you score books out of and how do you cone about this score?

I score books out of five stars and give half stars. I decide based on several factors for non-fiction:

Narrative

Quality of writing

Accuracy

 

And for fiction:

Plot

Characters

Plausibility

 

Do you review books?

Oh yes. I have a large number here on my blog and over 1600 on Good Reads

 

Where do you put your finished books?

I really need some of the L-Space that Pratchett wrote about to store all the books that I want to keep.

A lot of my review copies that I don’t want to keep, go to the library. Others can then read them, the authors get paid and I am doing my little bit to help them with the woeful underfunding they have currently got from central and local government

Some I keep (probably far too many according to my wife)

An ARC that I don’t want to keep goes in the recycling

 

How do you pick your next book?

I try and plan my reading ahead for the month, my last TBR was here for those that are interested. This is a plan only and not fixed in stone as inevitable what happens is that someone else reserves a book that I have out from the library and it gets bumped up the list, knocking others off the list. Or I change my mind. I do the odd occasional blog tour now, but I try to have far more than I will read on there as I can then pick and choose as I see fit.

 

Do you have any other rituals for when you have finished a book?

Update my spreadsheet and mark as read on Good Reads with the appropriate star rating, Start a new page on the OneNote book I use for writing reviews and copy the blurb in and very roughly type up any immediate notes and feelings about the book and write down any quotes that I want to use.

The book then ends up in a pile on my desk and then glares at me until I have read it or have to take it back to the library!

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