Booklogging
My Tumblr account worked well for me this past year as a way to log online reading (articles, notable blog posts—though inevitably many of the latter wound up in my Google Reader starred items, so I guess it depends on where I read something; I’m still more fractured in my chronicling than I would like to be). I need to be better about tagging, because once an article has Tumbld off the main page, I’m lazy about paging back for it. I could find something if I needed to, though, and that was the reason I set up the account.
I’ve tried half a dozen ways of recording the picture books I read to my younger set—which means I wound up with half a dozen incomplete lists. Messy. Paper just doesn’t cut it because Huck is a terror with my favorite Flair pens. Twitter would be fastest—I even set up a separate Twitter account just for book titles at one point, but I seldom used it because it’s a pain to log out of my main account and into the minor, and vice versa. Of course I could be perpetually logged into both at Brizzly, but I find I still don’t bother. I’m going to try using the Tumblr for this, too, a picture-book log, for a while. It’s such a fast and easy interface & I can jot notes longer than 140 characters if I so desire. So for now, until I forget about it, you can see what books my small fry are enjoying at the “Read to Rilla” tag on my Tumblr rillabooks tag on my Diigo page. (Edited four days later: turned out Tumblr just wasn’t right for my picture-book logging. I decided to use my Delicious account instead—only to discover that Delicious is on shaky ground these days. So I’m going with Diigo for social bookmarking. The picture book log also appears in my righthand sidebar now.)
I’ll keep chronicling the rest of my reading here at Bonny Glen, and on Goodreads when I remember. My 2010 book log is on this page. 2009. 2008.
Ellie says:
Sometimes I think there are too many options, and so recordkeeping becomes that much more difficult? I used to journal, daily, in books. Easy. I kept all of my homeschooling records on journal format too. One child, a series of hardbound journals: easy. (except what I really wanted was half a dozen children, so maybe easy isn’t really the right word. Easy with a side of regret). Then I — finally — had two more children. And the Internet was born. And I started blogging. And I found that paper journaling the homeschooling stuff wasn’t working with three kids, so I added a binder. Or two. And booklists. And then digital photography arrived. So now I had paper journals, paper binders, computer journals, digital photo logs and printed photos in stacks and in albums. It was all already beginning to feel like too much before this year’s health crisis, but now, with the computer still being impossible for me to use (let’s hear it for the trusty iPhone!), and handwriting difficult, record keeping of any kind is almost too much of a challenge, just when I want to be able to write, and recordkeep, more than ever, maybe. All of which babbling is to say, I feel your angst and long for one, simple, streamlined system my own self.
On December 28, 2010 at 10:27 am
Hannah says:
I use Goodreads to record both personal and homeschool reading, but I’m forever behind, and there’s no way I get every picture book logged.
On a happier note, I can log the fact that tonight I finished reading Carney’s House Party, and read Emily of Deep Valley a few days ago. LOVED them both so so much that I’m sorry they’re over! Loved your intro, too!
On December 28, 2010 at 7:01 pm
Fanny Harville says:
I use Library Thing (with tags) and Listography to record chapter books we’ve read plus I’ve put every picture book we own and have read on Library Thing; sometimes I remember to add picture books borrowed from the library to my Library Thing catalog, but not often. We read too many picture books to try to record in any comprehensive way, and I only have one kid! Can’t imagine trying to keep track with more!
On December 28, 2010 at 7:36 pm