I find that if I go on Amazon, look up the book and check the sample I can usually figure out if I've read it.
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Sometimes I can read the whole book again and only when I get to the actual end be sure that, yes, I had read that before. It's pretty embarrassing.
ETA I think I bought 3 copies of All Tomorrow's Parties like that.
ETA I think I bought 3 copies of All Tomorrow's Parties like that.
Ha! You can always keep a little book journal. I know several people who have a journal they've kept since youth where they simply note all the books they've read in a year.
That sounds like something I would enjoy and yet in actual practice seems to be something I would never come close to doing. Just think how many different ways I could lose the journal! Assuming I remembered to make the notes, which is a big assumption. No, no, I will embrace my fuzzy reading history with all its gaps and elisions. Remembering that "oh, yes, I *did* read that AND I have opinions!" can be pretty fun, too, when it happens.
David I’ve managed a couple times to track the books I read in a year….it’s usually over 300 so….yeah, a journal is limited use.
And if it's a paper journal, how do you organize it? if it's chronological, do you have to go back to the beginning and skim each page? if by author, won't you run out of space for favorite authors? if by genre, the same? unless you get one with pages you can add in as needed (and I often find that they pop open and spill pages all over) ....
This here is why I gave up my paper journal and opened a Goodreads acct.
I am so bad about Goodreads. I think I set some stuff up to happen automatically but I mostly forget it even exists. Which is a shame, because it would probably be useful for me.
Goodreads fits the rewards center of my brain. I love checking my stats and having that record of what I read, when.
I read a ton of Donaldson back in high school, when there was actually not that much FSF to read. Don't read it: the hero is a rapist (this is not a spoiler, he does it almost first thing). The narrative is nihilistic and there's nobody to root for. I have no recollection if the writing itself is any good, but there are far more cheerful things to read nowadays.