Tracking is a difficult thing to do. As a book reviewer, I have dedicated shelves in a bookcase -- one for incoming and the rest tiered on where they will be donated to.

Bridgette, thank you for the review of "Once Upon a Blue Moon." The author said it gave him goose bumps (it was that good!). Your review are wonderful!

:) I was tracking films that I saw in the theater for a while (when I was working in the theater even--I saw a lot then) but geeze it would be tough to do books. I generally am in the process of reading maybe half a dozen at one time and when I finish they get whisked off to the library right away. I have a certain amount that I own which kinda gives a weird sort of summary of my reading time (random parts of series and such) but I haven't ever made a real record.

Ander

I've been tracking the books I read for a few years now. It's posted where my friends can see it, and they do it too. It's just a simple list with author and title and whether it's a reread or not. Each page has a year and then I separate it out by month. It's chronological, so I could tell you what order I read them in and in which month, but not exact dates. It's nice to see the totals for each month and see if I'm doing better or worse than the month before, or this time last year, etc. My goal is 100 books this year.

A book only gets added if I've finished it, so all those half-started books I'm in the middle of don't count. Magazine issues count if I've read it cover to cover. Manga and children's books count. Books in French count, since I can passably read French. Japanese manga do not.

For keeping track of books I own, I started at librarything.com . You can only post 100 before you have to pay for it though. It has a lot more features than just a database to keep track of your books.

I used to have a list that I'd tried to write down all the books I read, it got to about 400 (far from complete) and then I had to leave for the summer...all the books I read through the summer were on a memo pad (about another 40 or 50) that ended up in storage somewhere. Then the computer my original list was on had some troubles, so it's still on there but not very accessible and way out of date. Then I thought using epinions to keep track might work, but before "Suggest a Product" and before I knew about the bboard to suggest books, I just didn't review the ones that weren't on here. Then I went through a purging stage in which I deleted all my "truly horrible" reviews.

In short, of about a thousand books I've read in my short life, only approximately 50 of them are catalogued in a place I feel the records are safe...right here on epinions. Luckily, I only read a couple books a week so they're pretty easy to keep up with and if I even THINK about reading a book that's not in the database a suggest it so by the time I've finished reading it the page is already there.

I'm now a dedicated user of Chain Reading. I recommend it for anyone who plows through as many books as I do. It keeps track of what you're reading, what you want to read, and what you recommend to others. What it doesn't really do is track what you have already read, but you can do what I do and write a one-line review of the book and then you've got that data, too.

If anyone wants to see what it's all about, you can look at my profile here: http://chainreading.com/profile/juliecarter

It says I've read 91 books since August. Yipes.

Julie

Just a bump. Sorry.

Julie

I think it's great that you are asking your son to keep a log. I used to think that my log would be a gorgeous library of books, but that just ain't happenin' yet, in spite of numerous glances through the IKEA catalogue. I am really fond of my books though, and often wish I'd kept track of the books I've read that I no longer own or never owned.

I am a bit obsessive about some things. As far as what I read, I can use my reviews to do that, as it is now extremely rare for me to not review a book I have read. I do track how much I have read. Last year, I surpassed 15,000 pages for the first time. This year, I broke 16,000 pages.

My wife and I listen to recorded books in the car, and she keeps a spreadsheet to help her recall the titles. In the past 10-12 years, there's more than 1,000 titles on it. There are a few she's done that I haven't (she likes romance more than I do) and a few I've done that she hasn't (I like history more than she does). She consumes printed books on Photoshop and digital photography, and I read the occasional bio, history or novel in print -- these don't make it onto the spreadsheet. However, looking at that spreadsheet is amazing... it's big.

--Bob

Sure; and here is how. I peel the price sticker, which at BAM has a title and ISBN, and stick it in a little notebook. This lets me track the spending, you see. I save the packing sheets from Amazon. Between these two things, I have a list of every thing I buy, which within 5 months, turns into everything I have read.

Hope that helps.

Talyseon.