How to keep track of books you've read

Decide what you actually want to look back on

Before choosing a tool, be honest about the question you want to answer later. Most readers want one of four things: a count for the year, a list they can search when someone asks for a recommendation, a record of what they thought at the time, or proof of how their taste changed.

The count needs almost nothing. A searchable list needs titles and authors kept in a consistent place. Opinions need a rating or a few lines of notes. Taste over time needs dates, which is the field people most often skip and most often wish they had.

If you want all four, record five fields per book: title, author, the date you finished, a rating, and one sentence about it. That is about twenty seconds of work per book, and it answers every question above.

Compare the four common methods

A paper notebook is the nicest to use and the worst to search. It is a good fit if you finish under thirty books a year and enjoy the ritual more than the data.

A spreadsheet sorts and counts better than anything else, and it is free. The catch is entry: you type the title, the author, the page count and the dates yourself, and you do it on a laptop rather than in the chair where you were reading.

A note in your phone wins on speed and loses on structure. It is a list of titles, which is fine until you want to know how many books you read in 2024 or which of them you rated highly.

A book tracking app fills in the title, author, cover and page count from a search or a barcode scan, then keeps the dates for you. That is the difference between a record you maintain and a record that maintains itself.

Set up a log you will keep using

Whichever tool you pick, the setup below takes about ten minutes and removes the two things that kill reading logs: a backlog you never catch up on, and a record that lives somewhere you rarely open.

1. Add the book you are reading right now, and nothing else. Retroactively entering four years of reading is the fastest way to abandon a log in week one.
2. Record the finish date every time. Titles without dates cannot be counted by year, and the year is what most readers want to see.
3. Rate each book as you finish it, while you still remember how it felt. A number you assign six months later is a guess.
4. Write one sentence per book. Not a review. Enough that reading it in two years brings the book back.
5. Put the log where your reading happens. If you read in bed on your phone, the log lives on your phone.

Backfill the past, but only once

If you are moving from Goodreads or StoryGraph, you do not have to retype anything: both let you download your library as a CSV, and tome. can import that file with its shelves and dates intact.

If your history is in a notebook or a phone note, give yourself one sitting to enter the last year and stop there. Older reading is pleasant to have and rarely used. The value of a log is almost entirely in the books you add from today onwards.

Keep it honest about what you did not finish

A log of only finished books quietly distorts your reading year. Abandoned books took real time, and knowing which ones you put down at page forty is useful the next time a similar title turns up on a recommendation list.

Keep a separate shelf for them. In tome. that is the Did Not Finish shelf, and it counts as a decision rather than a failure. Readers who track abandonments tend to abandon sooner, which is usually the right call.