In the Lair Reading

As part of my resolutions for 2025, I want to get back into reading books (in addition to the monstrous amounts of fanfic I read) and diligently tracking it. After all, I'm 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 it - 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 with that. 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, like a status update for various books so I can go back and enjoy the feed.

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 also like Notion because unlike pretty much every other thing I work on with this website, 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. (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). So, for right now, Notion's 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.

Click if you dare and visit the monster's reading lair.