Goodreads Tips

I’ve been using Goodreads to track my to-read list and my reading since 2010. Over that time I’ve figured out several tricks to help make the most of Goodreads as a source of data about my reading --especially for tracking my personal reading goals. I find that Goodreads has lot of useful functionality that’s not well documented and can be somewhat clunky to use. So I thought I’d write up some of my most-used ways to get info out of Goodreads.

All of these tips are for the web browser version of Goodreads. They all begin at the “My Books” page. You can get there by clicking on “My Books” at the top leftish (after “Goodreads” and “Home”) of the screen.

Show the intersection of two (or more) Shelves
Goodreads lets you add lots and lots of tags or “Shelves,” as they call them. Sometimes it’s handy to see a list of works that you’ve tagged with more than one shelf. For example, you might have one shelf called “fantasy” and one called “lgbt+”. If a friend asked you to rec them some queer fantasy, it would be helpful to see what books have both tags. So here’s how you do that.

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Show all books with a tag read in a year
This is super helpful when you have a reading goal like “read 15 non-fiction books this year.”

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Sort by date published
Did you know you can get goodreads to sort your books by all kinds of things that don’t show up in the default view? My personal favorite is date published, but you can also sort by things like condition, or even recommender. I’ll be using date published for this example though.

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I hope some of you find this helpful! Let me know if anything is confusing and I’ll try and help you out. And please share any Goodreads tips that you have.