What to read next?

When I finish a book, I often have a small struggle to determine what to read next. I largely addressed it last summer when I set up more meta data around my book library, but I’ve recently taken it a bit further.

Thanks to tips from folks like Adam Walker, I now have a good bit more info that goes along with every book on my list. It takes a few minutes to collect this info, but reading a book takes hours so the investment of time in improving my list is well worthwhile.

No matter where you keep your “books I want to read” list, hopefully these ideas can help you make the list more valuable for yourself. Here are the 10 things I store with every book now:

Title: Kind of important to have the title in the note.

Author: Same deal. In my case, I tag them so that I can view the author page and see all of their books in one place, which can be handy.

Reading Status: I have “Not Read”, “To Read”, “Currently Reading” and “Done Reading”. The “Not Read” is new, and is for books that end up in my notes somehow (usually mentioned in another book) that I don’t necessarily plan to read soon. I want to track them, but “To Read” is the tag that goes on books that I’d like to get to soon. The advantage is that my “To Read” list is now much shorter and easier to flip through without all of those “Not Read” books getting in the way.

Tagline: I like to keep the “title” simple, but most books have a longer tagline that goes with them, so I store it here.