December 29, 2024
In the Lair Reading
Digital Reading Journal & Resource Center
Reading resources and personal reading journal
Books • Literature • Reading
Mood: Subdued
Music: Rain sounds
Snack: Wine
Quote: “Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.” - Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
As part of my resolutions for 2025, I want to get back into reading books (in addition to the considerable, tasty amounts of fanfic I read) and diligently tracking it. After all, I am on count down to begin my masters of science in library and information science! So, if I'd like to stay apprised of popular and critically acclaimed titles to read, I ran into a problem: I kind of dislike both goodreads and storygraph (even though I still have and maintain them). I haven't tried hardcover.app yet; worth a look at some point. Of course, there's booktok, bookstagram, and bookstodon. Those aren't dedicated sites for the whole industry though. We'll see if anything can usurp Goodreads as the best book-centric social media website. In the meantime, I wanted something of my own.
Thanks to Reddit user cath_jane in the r/notion subreddit for creating this awesome template, I got started. Took out some database properties (I don't really do reading challenges), added ones like "Quotes" and a gallery view of them sorted by recent. I'm thinking of adding another property like "thoughts and feelings" as I progress, so I can post status updates for the books I'm reading.
I chose notion.so because I'm already familiar with it. I've played with it on and off for the past several years and their databasing features have significantly grown. Their formula markup is a bonkers to me (so many '(prop)'s) but as long as there are brilliant, generous people with free templates to get me started, I've been managing happily.
I'm choosing a different platform from neocities altogether because my love for playing with HTML, CSS, and Javascript cannot keep up with how often I want to update my reading progress, add a favorite quote, or add a book to my database. Alas, I've come to the point of needing a content management system. And, look I know I need to set up github pages to push to neocities; I've gotten started on that but I keep hitting snags because I don't really know my way around github. For right now, notion is my sweetheart.
Let it be known too that my digital collection/reading journal database is not all that's there. I link to my goodreads and storygraph, my favorite "find a new book to read" resources, and then I have a whole page of "Dark Libraries" web bookmarks to peruse.
