Ah, January. When a young reader’s heart turns to updating all of his lists of various books to read, collect, etc. Okay, so I’m not exactly young and most people’s hearts may not turn that way. But mine does in January.

This past fall, I did a deep dive into Calibre, the ebook library manager program that I use. I’ve used the Windows version on my computer for about, umm, 10 years now, I think. I’ve often had multiple “libraries” of ebooks on my computer … ones that were waiting to be looked at, others that were actually part of collections / series that I’m working on, some from the library that I hadn’t sorted out yet when I would get to them. Tons of books I got way back in the heyday of Kindle ownership where people gave away dozens of ebooks free each day in the yearly teens of the new millennium. Plus books I had read, were reviewing, etc.

I found it hard to effectively manage my ebooks in multiple libraries, and I looked online for the forums, asked questions, explained how I “saw” my library and asked for tips on how to do it better. Which a bunch of fellow bibliophiles responded to with lots of suggestions. In the end, all of them basically said, “Put them all in one library and let the computer give you filtered views when you want to see different “sets” of books”. It is, after all, mostly a giant database with links to the book files.

I am now quite happy with the majority of my setup in the library. I’m down to 10 main workflow categories, all mutually exclusive ones that books “move” through from acquisition to having been read and reviewed:

1. TBR: Fiction
2. TBR: Series
3. TBR: Non-fiction
4. ACTIVE
5. REVIEWING: Backlog
6. REVIEWING: Current
7. FINAL: Fiction
8. FINAL: Non-Fiction
9. FINAL: Reference
10. FINAL: Did not finish

Admittedly, the TBRs categories are nominally huge but I won’t be reading all of them. Some of them came from a huge data dump of free books I got at some point, and while I weeded out a bunch (from 20K down to 10K), there’s probably another 5K to get rid of at some point. It’ll still lead me with about 20 years’ worth of reading. 🙂

But as I was playing with the recent additions, I realized that there are some other features I can add to the library manager that will actually give me some stats. Every January, I set goals, but somewhere as the year goes on, I kind of lose track. Dead tree versions are particularly problematic to keep track of, but even the ebooks get backlogged. But I went through basically everything I have from #5 to #10 above.

It brings my total up to about 475 books that are in the “read” stage or beyond, even though my actual reviewed list is a little less than half of that (225 or so). For the 475, I’ve added the years in which I’ve read them…goes back all the way to 1978, but there are lots in the last 7-8 years…and that gives me a bit of data to play with and share. The reviews could be new or old, but there’s a reason the backlog grew. 🙂

2017. 20 books read, 16 reviews
2018. 22 books read, 5 reviews
2019. 58 books read, 53 reviews
2020. 78 books read, 17 reviews
2021. 32 books read, 9 reviews
2022. 57 books read, 19 reviews
2023. 63 books read, 18 reviews
2024. 1 book read (so far), 0 reviews

So that means 137 recent books reviewed, plus another 88 old ones added to the website. That still leaves 47 to review from the last year or so, and another 187 in backlog.

Of course, I also have 332 ones to read “soon” in my “active” folder. Which I used to have all synched to my Kindle, which was looney toons to manage. So, I cut that back to about 20 for now. I probably should add a new category around 4B to the top set which is “Books to read this year”, and only pull 10-20 of those forward to the Kindle.

What I don’t know what to do is how to prioritize my TBR list. 🙂 Do I read the first / next one in each series? Or binge my way through like a rabid reader hooked on Netflix more than phonics? Do I set myself a rigid balance of Fiction to Non-fiction?

A lovely first-world problem to have, I know. What really warms my cockles is that I’ve managed to write about 20 new reviews each year over the last seven years (while still putting everything else up, and blogging almost 2M words), and averaging about 47 books a year. My goal is always 52, which I managed to surpass 4 times. And that’s just on the stats I *know* that I have so far. Other books will turn up and add to those titles, again mostly dead tree versions.

But for the first time in a really long time, I kind of feel like my library is mostly where I want it to be and I know what’s happening with it. Now I can start prioritizing dumping the dead tree versions of some old stuff while reading the 332 books I have in my active list hehehe