Goodreads - let's be friends

Life
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Hello fellow beeminders,

I am quite a heavy user of goodreads to track my reading, find new books, read reviews, etc.

I have a handful of people I follow and frequently find great books based on what they are reading or reviews they have written.

I can only imagine that beeminder users are a well read bunch with some overlapping interests, so if anyone would like to post their goodreads account, I’d love to friend some of you!

This is me: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/39411680-max-martin

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I’m mostly on my blog these days (breathesbooks.com), but I do crosspost to Goodreads and read reviews there: http://goodreads.com/shanaqui

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I read a lot of fantasy books so if you are interested here is my profile: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5708815-cameron-harris

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What a fun idea! I mostly read academic books but am trying to get back in the swing of voracious reading so I’d love to peek at others’ fun reading. I’m here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2688831-lawrence

I’m also a Goodreads Librarian, so if you ever need a book’s database entry to be edited (wrong publication year, editions that need to be merged into one book, etc, etc), just message me and I’ll happily take care of it. (Or if you’re the kind of person who instinctively wants to tidy those things up, you could probably become a Goodreads Librarian yourself!)

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Well that sounds like a fun idea, I shall take you up on it Max - I’m over at https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/48319145-clive-freeman

At the start of this year I managed to hook up Beeminder to the RSS feed that comes off the back end of one’s Goodreads account, so whenever I mark a book as finished on Goodreads, it automatically credits me one point on that Beeminder goal. Target this year: 52 books across the year, and doing ok so far (27 read by mid-June).

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Cool! I see a lot of books that I’ve read in your profile.
Here’s mine - https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4371602-alex

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Can you talk a bit more about this set up - how have you put it together? I think an auto-update from Kindle to Goodreads is possible for reading position, what are the goodreads RSS options?

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Can you talk a bit more about this set up - how have you put it together? I think an auto-update from Kindle to Goodreads is possible for reading position, what are the goodreads RSS options?

In goodreads, if you go to any of your shelves, there will be an RSS logo at the bottom right of the screen. You could use IFTTT to add a datapoint every time that RSS feed were updated (for example, ever time a book is added to your ‘read’ shelf), that is how I’d set up something like that!

I do use a kindle, and set books as ‘currently reading’ or ‘read’ in goodreads using the ‘About this book’ popup that shows on the kindle when you start and end books. Works great.

I actually track reading by “locations read” personally, currently I’m just updating that goal manually at the end of the day.

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Thanks!

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Just as @penten says, I used the RSS feed off the back of Goodreads, attached to an IFTTT rule. It was slightly fiddly to set up, so I’ve attached a screenshot of what I came up with in case it is useful to others.

ifttt_goodreads_rule
ifttt_goodreads_rule.JPG390×926 42 KB

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I’m only tracking times I sit down to read with a goal of 4 sessions a week. I am probably an exception here but I like the manual component of beeminder note taking where I’ll write the book I’m working on and note when I start/finish the book.

Separately, I run a reading challenge on goodreads - usually 24 books/year but I’m going for 48 this year. The combination of the two is sufficient for me. I’m using beeminder specifically to make sure I hold the line on a habit of daily reading and not track to my longer term books per year goals.

I’d certainly be interested in being able to track pages/locations read per day from kindle as well as minutes listened on audible.

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Here’s my profile https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/38008308-markos
I don’t do reviews but i do publish my notes (fwiw)

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I recreated a profile just now to see if Goodreads might be something for me after all. So there is not much to see yet. And if this is not already discouraging enough I’m reading a German book right now about the Philosophy of the Ocean. But I‘ve followed you all over there and am ready to be inspired! :star_struck:

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I love GoodReads so much. Here’s my profile, send me a friend request. :smile: (Just include in the request message that you’re coming from Beeminder)

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Tell me about the philosophy of the ocean…

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Well, there’s lots to tell, according to the book. I found it very enlightening in terms of the long history philosophy has with engaging the ocean as a metaphorical reservoir, but also as a very concrete area of discussion (law of nature, ethical discourse around environmental destruction). The book recounts this history, how and why the ocean has been relevant to subfields such as philosophy of law, aesthetics, philosophy of life, etc. What’s interesting to me: The aesthetic category of the sublime (Erhabenheit) and how it relates to the incomprehensibility of the ocean, its opaqueness and how all of this relates to society but also the “observing subject” (using old-school terms here, but really it’s about actors or mediators for me). The ambiguity of the ocean might be read as our own blindness before an incomprehensible actor or a network of those, rather than simply unanswering darkness (think: finally realizing the darkness you see is your own reflection from a big mirror; the ocean has been seen as the mirror of the soul for some philosophers). It’s all very useful for my own theoretical concept of thalassophobia (“an intense and persistent fear of the sea or of sea travel…”), which I use as a metaphor to express certain observations about doing field work in non-academic scholarly work on the internet[1], namely, that the opaqueness of any scholarly venture risks uncovering the horror of incomprehensibility if the environment of the medium to be researched is different enough.

  1. I followed a group of non-academic social scientists and philosophers on social media for about five years, but had to abandon the project at some point. ↩︎

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Thread got bumped to my attention. I’m in: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5905061-howtodowtle

Also I didn’t find an existing group on Goodreads and no-one mentioned it here so I took the freedom to make a Beeminder group on Goodreads. Be welcome: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/897960-beemindereaders

Possible features of a Goodreads group:

  • We have a group bookshelf there which every member can add to.
  • Might be easier to keep an overview if this thread gets really long.
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This was the format I went with in the end, still works a treat:

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