Over the weekend, I was getting close to finishing reading my first book of 2025, so I knew I’d need to roll 2024’s log into a new page to free up that space for this year’s reads. Just making that new page and copying over the text was easy enough. Except my practice for years when making that move was to re-order the titles to group them by category, because that sort of thing interests me, seeing how my fiction/non-fiction split has changed and such. (And yes, StoryGraph and goodreads before it do that sort of thing, but that’s not the same as having my own record on my own hard drive, grouped just how I want.) I hadn’t managed to do that re-ordering for 2022 or 2023, much less 2024, when 2025 rolled around. I dove in and did 2022, then started 2023 (well, first I did an awful mashup of 2013 and 2023 due to not having deleted the 2013 working file for some reason). When flipping back to prior years online, I noticed some bad links and bad formatting and non-secure pages, and that made me want to revisit all the old logs and fix them, and then I got tired and overwhelmed and gave up for the night. That was Saturday.

Yesterday, I got back at it and made a list of the things I wanted to do to spiff up the old log pages (starting with 2002-2003):

– change any http:// links to https://
– move prior/next links to top of page, and make sure they’re also at the bottom of the page, and make sure they’re all consistently formatted
– make category titles into anchor links and link from top of page
– add explanation of codes like (RR) to top of page
– fix any obvious wonky text formatting and fix/delete any links that aren’t working that present themselves while doing the other stuff

Once I got into a rhythm, it didn’t take too long, but still much longer than if I’d just plopped 2024 into its own page, updated links on pages before/after, and moved on to 2025. When I got all the old pages updated, I still had to group 2024’s titles into categories, and that was tedious enough that for 2025 I’m going to try something new and do the category view behinds the scenes as the year unfolds, so it’ll be ready for an easy rollover a year from now.

One thing I considered changing was making all the years have the same categories for consistency’s sake, but decided to leave it because the categories give some hints about where my head was at. I started with Non-Fiction, Fiction, and Fluffy Fiction (which meant genre fiction, mostly mysteries) for the first couple years, then did just Non-Fiction and Fiction for a year before breaking out themes from both Non-Fiction (Crafting) and Fiction (Paranormal) in 2006 (which was also when I converted to calendar rather than fiscal years). Non-Fiction—Crafting stuck around for a few years, joined by Non-Fiction—Memoir, Autobiography, Biography and Fiction and Fiction—Historicals and Other Romances. The latter two rolled into Fiction—Paranormal, Romance, SciFi, Fantasy in 2009, the year Non-Fiction—Crafting was replaced by Non-Fiction—Real Estate because we were looking hard at buying the condo I’m now typing this in. And so on and so on as my interests ebbed and flowed.

The codes I used are also interesting in that I can see how my audiobook consumption fell (podcasts took their place, then I stopped commuting to work) and ebook consumption rose over the years. At first I marked ebooks with a K for Kindle since they were the minority; now I mark the books I read in paper with a P, as ebook is my default. Wonder if I’ll be around long enough to need a new code for VR books or something.

One more thing I considered but fortunately did not get sidetracked into doing just then was adding the early years before I got on goodreads in 2006 to StoryGraph (I imported everything since then into SG when I started there in summer of 2020. I have added a few titles there from the early years when I wanted to fill in a series and such, but it would be nice to have it all in one place which makes me nice graphs and charts to look at. Maybe later.

At any rate, I did get the log rolled over and just this morning put my first finish for 2025 into the Books I’ve Read page.

On this date in 2013 through 2024: No journal entries
2012: Winter? Not So’s I Could Tell
2011: No entry
2010: New Beginnings
2009: Three is a Magic Number
2007 & 2008: No entries
2006: Cookie Dog
2005: Just a Day
2003 & 2004: No entries