Good reads!

Who would ever think of keeping track of books read and of the eventual progress in their reading? Well, that’s part of the concept of goodreads.com, or at least the way I make use of its features since I discovered it a few days ago.

A quite small change in my life, but a useful one. Keeping track of activities has always proven useful (GitHub, Redmine, or for some hardcore users, social networks themselves), but I would never have expected that for books.

The site itself encourages you to register the books you already read, want to read or are currently reading. It acts like a to-to list, and for me as a way to showcase my readings (be it along my CV or to my friends to get recommendations based on what I’ve read). That creates a motivating synergy which made me read some books again and post update statuses of those I was reading.

Plus, I often read technical books and it is quite hard to find varied comments about them. Recently I found myself reading Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, editions Dunod) and found only (extremely) positive comments on developer sites. As with masses, comments tend to reach a point where all counter-opinion is either ignored or not valued enough. Here on Goodreads, comments were surprisingly varied (though still positive) and easily pointed to alternatives.

If only traditional social networks were as refreshing!

P.S: a link with my goodreads profile, would you want to recommend me something.

@article{rigelk20160024,
  title = "Good reads!",
  author = "Rigel Kent",
  journal = "http://localhost:8080",
  year = "2016",
  url = "http://localhost:8080/blog/good-reads/"
}