I’ve been an avid user of Goodreads for tracking books for the last ten years. Tom MacWright wrote a post and a script utility last year to export and format items from Goodreads into pages that could work in a Jekyll site, like his and this one. On my profile I track more than just what I’m reading; I also log start and finish dates, ratings, reviews, and more. Getting a feed somewhere on the website would certainly be cool (I have a branch now with this in progress). On my way to getting that working, I took the Goodreads export format and put it in a Google Sheet, then edited a good bit to build out a richer dataset that I can keep adding to over time. I added fields for format, whether a book is part of a series, and a URL to get to book’s listing.

I have some ideas on some simple analyses to do on this data. Once I get the feed publishing my reading log inline with the blog posts, I’ll work on some experiments with visualizations that could be done with this dataset.