InnerTeub

I love Goodreads and I demand you all join it.

Goodreads is like Facebook except you only get updates about what people are reading or what they want to read. The homepage simply scrolls down the changes to people’s reading list… “so and so added THIS book to read!” “so and so read THIS book and thought it sucked” etc.  (Ok, so now that I think about it more carefully there is actually nothing like Facebook about this site, except they both fall under “social media” but whatever)

I started with Goodreads in 2008, and then promptly forgot about it. The trick to enjoy the site is having a decent list of friends who you can turn to in order to get reading suggestions or to get a feel for a book you’re thinking about picking up (or to commiserate in the completely awful yet you loved it anyway guilty pleasure books.) This summer I added the iPhone app and could easily get to my “To-Read” list whenever I was in a library or a bookstore, which made the site that much more useful.

So. You should all go join, and that way you can see all the books I mention haphazardly here, and I can see the books on your radar, and we can all be happy book friends.

Pro Tips:

1. Do not join and think that you must automatically populate your “Read” list with every book you have ever read. That is an overwhelming time suck and will turn you off from the site forever. We know you didn’t start reading today, we will go on faith that you have read many interesting and literary books in the past; it is completely acceptable to start at zero for Goodreads purposes and build up your “shelves” as you go along starting with the day you joined.
2. When reviewing books do not, under any circumstance, start the review with a summary of the plot. That is not a book review, that is a book report, and Goodreads helpfully supplies that plot summary on the very same page where I am reading your review.  There is nothing less helpful than scanning the page of a book you think you’re interested in only to find that 30 people have supplied their basic timeline of the story instead of their opinions about it. Stop that. Helpful reviews include things like “I really like true crime stories, and this particular book does that one thing I like really well” or “This book has a decent premise, but the writing was so impressed with itself that it made me want to strangle it.” Tell people WHY you like a book, not what the book is ABOUT.
3. Friend me so I can see what you’re reading and read your fantastic non-plot summarizing reviews.