reading spreadsheets

[bedlamsbard]

I'll do a proper book round-up for December and the rest of 2013 later, but I've been setting up my Reading 2014 spreadsheets, which have considerably more subdivisions this year: Books, Audiobooks, Comics, and Articles. I've got seven holdovers from 2013, five books and two audiobooks, and bizarrely, all the books have authors whose names start with M, either first or last: Mercedes (Lackey, twice), Max (Gladstone), (John Jackson) Miller, Martha (Wells), and (James) Mallory (cowritten with Mercedes Lackey). STRANGE. Mysterious.

I had a question about my spreadsheets earlier that I forgot to answer, so a quick rundown:



For 2012 and 2013 my spreadsheets looked (more or less) like this:



What I was actually reading varied a lot through the year -- that one you can actually see the instant when I switch from reading for fun to reading for school.



That's from July and August, when I was doing a lot of my dissertation reading -- unfortunately I had no way of including articles at the time, so a lot is left out.



Later I started reading a lot of comics and had to work out a way to include them on the spreadsheet -- earlier on some of the TPBs I read, Hawkeye and Captain Marvel and Tales from Year Zero, aren't included, but almost all the Star Wars ones are.

Under the notes column, I've got a lot of shorthand, which roughly comes down to:

PGT -- postgraduate taught, anything I was reading for my degree
RR -- reread
ANTH -- anthology
DNF -- did not finish
AB -- audiobook
ABR -- abridged
EB -- ebook
SS -- short story
NOV -- novella
SER -- serial
DISS -- dissertation, anything I was reading specifically for my dissertation
TPB -- trade paperback (comics)
OMN -- omnibus
OL -- online
GRA -- graphic novel
MAG -- magazine

The source column refers to where I got the book (or whatever in question), and includes some more shorthand, mostly for libraries:

DWL -- David Wilson Library (University of Leicester library)
LCL -- Leicester Central Library
EPL -- Ellensburg Public Library
WAL -- Washington Anytime Library
HTL -- Howard-Tilton Memorial Library (Tulane University library)

During the school year, I also keep week-by-week color-coded page count spreadsheets (in two parts here):





This is from when I was writing my dissertation; during the normal term it would be divided up by class, but that's too difficult to screencap. That's just author name, page count (page span), in weekly columns and color-coded by day so I can tell at a glance what I was reading and when. (This is actually really interesting -- it doesn't show up so well for my diss, but during the term it's cool to see what I was reading for what class when.) At the bottom I've got total page counts for the week -- here, divided up by dissertation, dissertation + general classics reading, and dissertation + general + leisure.

I actually started doing this during spring semester my sophomore year of undergrad, when I had a bunch of reading heavy classes and I was just curious to see how much I read per week. I don't do this during holidays because it's too much hassle and because at that point, I'm more interested in what than how much when.

So that's my reasonably nerdy reading spreadsheet explanation. In my experience, nothing makes people's eyes glaze over faster than telling them you keep color-coded spreadsheets of what you're reading, but hopefully it's of interest to someone!

There may be easier ways to do this, but I actually have no idea how to use Excel, so I'm basically making it up as I go.