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Thursday, January 15, 2015

[Bookish Blabber #3] The Goodreads Purge!


The Goodreads Purge!!

At the end of 2014 I looked at my Goodreads and found it to be cluttered and a lot of my shelves don't even make sense to me. So I have decided to do some house cleaning!

Before:
784 books on to-read shelf 
8 books on on-hold shelf
792 books in the queue
52 non-exclusive shelves (a book can be assigned to several non-exclusive shelves)

My first step is to eliminate the "on-hold" shelf. I created the on-hold shelf when I wasn't brave enough to DNF a book outright. I thought that maybe I would get back to it and not feel as guilty. In the end I need to get rid of this shelf and either place the book back in the TBR pile or cut it all together. 

790 books in the queue

Okay so now the big one, culling the TBR. I was reading a post the other day (sorry I can't remember which blog) but her method was to only place books on the to-read shelf if she actually owned them. In the same spirit I'm going to only add books to my to-read shelf if I have them in my possession (e.g., own a personal copy, advanced copy, etc.). So here goes nothing...

491 to-read, 7 dnf, and 118 interested shelf

So cut out a lot, yay! I did create an exclusive DNF shelf and exclusive interested shelf. These allow me a place to put books that just didn't work for me and those that I'd like to read on day but don't own. 491 books is still a lot so I'll be doing some offline culling as well. 

Next up is shaving down all the non-exclusive shelves because some of these have no books and others I can't remember why I created them to start with... haha! 

18 non-exclusive shelves! 489 to-read!

This de-cluttering felt so awesome. What I discovered is I really need to use the sorting and listopia features on Goodreads. It gives me what I need without having to add books to my shelves. 

So how do you Goodreads? Any more tips for me?

6 comments:

  1. Very impressive! My issue is that I think I need more shelves on GR, but maybe you're proving me wrong. I definitely need to cull my TBR-its over 1000 books for sure!

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    1. Oh wow, 1000 TBR! I found simpler worked better for me but I know plenty who do better with ignoring the over TBR list and focusing on the nonexclusive shelves. Good luck :) - meghann

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  2. I wrote a whole post about the impossibility of culling my TBR. I like your strategy of creating an Interested category. I actually didn't even realize that I could add new Exclusive shelves!

    Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction

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    1. It's so hard isn't? I feel like I'm playing Survivor to see which books get kicked off the island... haha. Yes, when I figured out how all the shelves worked my plan started coming together. I'm sure I'll play around with them more. - meghann

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  3. I'm currently trying to do the same thing. About a year ago my original Goodreads account went "poof" and the goodreads team couldn't fix it so I had to import my files from my saved exported files and it got corrupted and created weird folders and just messed up my account. So I have a lot of work to do :P

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    1. That's a major bummer! You're braver than me... I probably would've just cried and held my own Goodreads pity party. Lots of hugs and luck your way :) - meghann

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