How much did you read this summer?

The Library’s Summer Reading Challenge is over and it’s time to make sure you’ve logged your activities (or your child’s) on your Summer Reading Bingo Card in Beanstack (or on paper) and logged all of your titles in Beanstack. Watch our front window to see if we’ve reached our goal of 4,000 reading activities this summer in our community.

One of the questions we get a lot at the library is: “Can you give me a list of the books that I’ve read?” And yes, we can do that! At least we can tell you what you’ve checked out during the last three years at the library, which is when we implemented our latest circulation system.

I was going back through my reading list to see how much I’ve read this summer and discovered that I’ve read nine books since the beginning of June. Full disclosure: half of those were audiobooks I listened to—but that still counts as far as I’m concerned. I can “read” when I mow the lawn, when I vacuum, when I drive to the grocery store and when I walk the dogs.

It gave me a bit of a chuckle to note that one of those books was actually something I had already read, but I evidently didn’t manage to log it in Goodreads which is my primary app for logging my reading. About a third of the way through listening to the book I realized that I HAD read it, but I didn’t remember what happened and I wanted to know so I just kept going!

There are actually a lot of ways that you can keep track of your reading to prevent that dreaded occurrence: checking out a book you’ve read before! You can use apps like Goodreads. I like Goodreads because it gives user ratings and when I find something at the library or online that looks interesting I’ll look it up in Goodreads—if it doesn’t have a collective rating of 4 or more, I’ll rarely read it unless it’s an author that I always read.

You can also use the Library’s Beanstack app to track your reading. One of the great features of Beanstack is that in addition to logging minutes read or titles, you can also leave reviews for titles that other people can see—and another feature we haven’t turned on yet is that you can see what your “friends” on the app are reading and get some great suggestions! We’ll be doing ongoing challenges with incentives throughout the year, so Beanstack is a great way to stay engaged with the library!

And finally-- you can also log into your account on our online catalog and see a list of what you’ve read recently (again, in the last three years). From the catalog, simply login with your library card number in the upper lefthand corner and use your last name (lowercase) as your password and then click on MY ACCOUNT.

You can see what you have checked out now, renew titles, place holds on books that you want to read next and see a history of everything you’ve checked out in the past. Of course the downside of this is if you’ve borrowed a book from a friend or bought one, it won’t show here, so apps like Beanstack or Goodreads are better if you get books from multiple sources. Also, there is no way to search within this list, so if you read a lot, this may be difficult, though you can download it to a spreadsheet and then search, but that seems a little cumbersome.

No matter what method you choose to track your reading, just keep reading!