Last month I shared my stats about my reading in 2024 (see here). I wanted to share the list of books, too, but it’s a pain (see here). I said I would share my book list manually in a blog post, but when I started working on that, I didn’t like the result. I looked at different ways to do it in a single blog post, but I didn’t like any of the options. I was hopeful that Airtable or Notion would work, but I didn’t like the idea of managing another external tool solely to house my reading list.

I think there’s another path that will enable me to share not only my 2024 reading list but all the books I read going forward. It’s more involved to set up, but I think it’ll be a better long-term solution and more helpful to anyone looking for biographies to read.

I needed to aggregate all the data from my reading list to do this correctly using this new path. So, last week and this weekend, I cleaned up the reading list I manage in Google Sheets. I did the following:

• Amazon affiliate links weren’t formatted consistently, which meant some links weren’t sending people the correct books (i.e., the edition I read). I formatted this correctly for each book and updated my spreadsheet. I also reviewed each blog post containing an Amazon link to a book and updated each one.
• I noted the edition, format (paperback, hardcover, or Kindle), and publication date of each book in my spreadsheet.
• I added to my spreadsheet a link to the blog post series I wrote about each book. Now I can quickly find my writing about a specific book instead of having to search the site.
• I updated the links to the posts on my blog. For each book, all posts related to that book are now linked.

This was a decent amount of tedious work. I went through every blog post I wrote in 2024, updated links, and added information from posts to my spreadsheet. The exercise wasn’t fun, but now I think it was worth it. The next step is to take the book-list information for past and future books and present it in a way that’s valuable to others.

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