I discovered Goodreads a couple years ago and found it instantly addictive. It’s a social network for sharing, organizing, and commenting on books. You can create your own shelves on which to hang books you’ve read, are currently reading, or mark to read. You can also invite your friends to join the service and opt in to see what’s new in their streams. So if they write a review or rate a certain book, it will pop up in your stream, you can decide if you want to check it out or not, and add it to one of your own shelves.

I bring Goodreads up for a number of reasons. The first is that when I first started using it, I had to go back in my mind and think about ALL the books I’ve read. This was a hard job for and English major who’s forgotten more books than he cares to admit. I’m still woefully behind in adding things to my library. Still, this is a great mental exercise that forced me to organize my reading for the first time ever. I could now see how many non-fiction versus fiction books I had read, for example, or if I was missing a certain book in a series or family of writers. The task of cataloguing puts a lot of things in perspective for me, and I find that I am recognizing patterns in this volume of data that I once had not previously seen. This is a GREAT exercise that will help you measure your pattern recognition abilities, something which futurist Venessa Miemis calls an essential skill for 21st century thinking.

Courtesy of an-inkling.com

Secondly, as a social animal, I am finding all kinds of value in the connections I make on Goodreads. In many cases, these connections are very different from the ones I have on other social media. For example, I don’t have a relationship with the guy I buy comic books from, Don Alsafi of G-Mart Comics in Chicago. Well, at least our relationship has been defined simply by my buying comics from him. However, once we became connected on Goodreads, we’ve exchanged quite a few different ideas about books we’ve either read or want to read. Most of this happens without us having an actual conversation, or at least the conversation is marked simply by signifiers in one of our ratings or reviews of the books we read. But these signifiers are not directed at any one connections. They are free and open to the community. So I’m basically getting a free window into Don’s mind regarding the books he’s read. We skip the conversation and get right to the information: PLANETARY is fucking AWESOME. Got it. Moving on. I like the elegance of this network, which is not to say there’s not plenty of interactive conversation in Goodreads’ network of groups. Plus, you can always make a comment on someone’s review or rating.

Finally, the last reason I bring up Goodreads is that one of my AWESOME readers recently asked me why I don’t do more book reviews on Must. Be. AWESOME!!! The answer’s pretty simple: I review every book I read on Goodreads. The writeups can range from a paragraph to more detailed to only a rating, but I find that for books, it’s easier for me to put my thoughts into a single space that has already been catalogued, tagged and organized rather than creating new content for this space.

So if you’re looking for my thoughts on any number of books, feel free to follow me on Goodreads. I’m still working out how I can get a good Goodreads widget set up to flow my content there to my blog (most of the WordPress plugins are dismal), so if you have any good ideas on that, let me know. Otherwise, I do have my Goodreads feed connected to Twitter and Facebook too, so reviews and ratings will occasionally pop into those streams as well (sporadically, though, because of the unevenness of the interfaces).

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