Tracking Your Reading
I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted an actual book review, and unfortunately, it’s going to be a while longer, for a variety of reasons:
1) I’m going out of town for a conference this coming week, and while I will probably finish my audiobook (Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling) on the drive tomorrow, I’m reviewing it for SF Site, and I don’t like posting those reviews here until they’re already up over there.
2) After my disappointment with Queen of Attolia, I wanted to read something that I knew I would enjoy, and more, something that I could really get absorbed in. Fortunately, my choice, The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon is filling both of those requirements excellently. Unfortunately, it’s almost a thousand pages long, so I’m not even halfway through yet (although that’s only unfortunate from a review/blogging standpoint, I’m perfectly happy to spend a thousand pages with Jamie and Claire).
3) The reason I am not even halfway through yet is because all of my free time that I would normally be spending reading has been spent packing up the SIX MILLION packages of Forgotten Realms books I agreed to send out for BookMooch. Technically, each point I earned cost me less than my normal mailing-out pace (plus the books themselves were free), so I shouldn’t be complaining, but… NEVER AGAIN. Just too overwhelming to have to deal with almost 70 pending mooches at once. On the flip-side, I am never, ever going to run out of points, so I don’t have to worry about sending more books out for a long, long time.
So anyways, because I am sure that all of you are sitting at your computers, frantically refreshing your readers in hopes of a new post from me (heh), I’ve uploaded a new-and-improved version of my reading tracking spreadsheet!
You enter the dates you finish books, the number of pages (or the length of the audiobook), and your goal for the year (if you have one), and it calculates your average reading speed, the number of pages you read per day, how many books you’re likely to read by the end of the year, whether you’re above or below pace to reach your goal, and it makes pretty graphs.
Download it from Mediafire here.
If you download it and like it, if it doesn’t work, or if you have any suggestions on how to make it better and even more nerdy, please let me know!
Fyrefly's Book Blog 
Awesome! Now I just have to figure out whether I want to wait until January to use it, or switch all my data over now…
Burn down/up charts like that remind me so much of work. I don’t know… :) Of course, it might be nice to be more analytical about how much I’m reading. I’m going to have to give this a try. It might be fun to do in September.
Dev – You should just be able to quickly copy/paste the dates and page numbers from the old version and have it work fine. I added in the columns for author/title mostly to make it easier for me to see which books I needed to go and look up page numbers for.
LH – I spend so much time with Excel spreadsheets at work that it was almost refreshing to make one for something fun like reading. Plus, I like being able to look at the graph and see when I was reading a lot or a little vs. what was going on in my life at the time.
Um, wow! Honestly, that looks like way to much for me at the moment, but it’s kind of fun to see how you are doing.
Natasha – Unfortunately, that orange line has been flat since I posted this – the conference is sucking away all of my reading time, and I’m in the middle of several looooooong books. Ah well.
OMG someone else who is as obsessive about reading and keeping track of it as I am! I think I love you!
btw I count S.M.Stirling as one of my favorite authors. I hope you are enjoying Dies the Fire.
k
Looks like a great graph – hopefully I will be able to understand how to input the information. I like to work in Excel. Thanks for the copy.
By the way – I found your blog through J.Kaye – she did a spotlight on you!!!
kcs – Obsessive can be such an ugly word… I prefer “slavishly addicted”. :)
Kara – Welcome! If you’ve got any questions about (or suggestions for) the spreadsheet, let me know! Hopefully it’s pretty straightforward, though.