First off: Are you on Goodreads?! It is one of my favorite social media platforms, because, of course, it centers around books. I love peaking at what my friends are reading and finding book recommendations based on what I’ve already read. Plus, they have a yearly challenge that is my favorite challenge to meet every year.
So if you aren’t on it yet, go ahead and join. I’ll wait right here.I’ve had two problems with Goodreads since I started. The first problem was that I couldn’t mark rereads on the website. If I read the book multiple times (which I love to do), I couldn’t accurately show how often I’ve read the book. In February, Goodreads fixed this problem!
Now, I’m going to tell you how to solve the second problem I have. It is not difficult to fix, and I’m probably not the first person to realize how this works, but I only discovered it a few days ago and it’s too good not to share.
So my other biggest problem is that once I moved a book to Read, I couldn’t take it off my list completely. I wanted to keep track of books that I’ve started but didn’t finish, and the only way to do that was keep them in Read and put them in a separate list labelled did-not-finish.
But, because I am the most OCD, it bugged me that my Read list wasn’t accurate, and worse, that I was getting book recommendations based on these books I didn’t like enough to finish.
TA DA!
There’s a nifty tool that Goodreads has built in to their bookshelf feature that will allow you to remove books from your Read list completely to mark as Didn’t Finish.
Note: As far as I can tell, this is easiest done on a browser, NOT the app. Because the app is awful.
First, open Goodreads, log in, and click My Books at the top header.
Once you get there, look on the sidebar where you see all of your bookshelves. Click (edit).
That will bring you to a list of all of your bookshelves. If you haven’t ever created bookshelves before, you will just have your default ones that Goodreads gives you. Now’s the time to make one titled “Attempted to Read” or “Didn’t Finish” or “HATEHATEHATE”. Then, click on the box labelled Exclusive next to that bookshelf.
By clicking this button, you are lumping this Attempted to Read bookshelf with the Read, Currently Reading, and To Read bookshelves. This exclusive button means that a book can only be in one of these categories. Now, any books you shelve into this category will automatically be removed from both your Want to Read shelf and your Read shelf, fixing the problem of recommendations and wrong Goodreads Challenge counts. Problem solved!
Any other questions about Goodreads? Leave them here and I’ll answer them!
