Other People’s Book Notes

Over on Mastodon, Jacky Alciné recently asked if anyone has examples of sites that talk about books.

As it turns out, I apparently do indeed have some favorite ways other people do this on their personal sites. To keep this list easier to find in the future, I figured I’d turn my quick response to him into a slightly-longer blog post.

Format: Mostly Notes, Thank You

A lot of people tend to have a pretty grid of book covers without their own notes, but with each cover linking to Bezos’s commerce site. That’s one way to track your reading, and I do usually appreciate the eye candy or occasional overall rating included in this approach.

I’m really more interested in people’s thoughts and feelings, though. So I prefer some sort of written summary or reaction.

It’s also very kind to put all one’s book notes in a single place, rather than interspersed in your blog posts. Blog posts are a great approach, of course, and I fully intend to do more reading reactions in posts here! But the examples below all take a more “digital garden” approach, even if some of them are still blog-ish.

Examples Elsewhere

Mandy Brown

If you haven’t already seen Mandy Brown’s A Working Library, you’re in for a treat. will usually have a few posts about a single book, and occasionally a sort of combo post that connects to a few. I really like her approach & site!

Tom MacWright

On Tom MacWright’s Reading page, he usually writes one overview review of a book. He doesn’t frequently situate it along other works—but I like encountering someone else’s thoughts in this format.

Derek Sivers

On Derek Siver’s Books I’ve Read page, he provides a succinct overview excerpt, and then each title also has a page with his notes. It’s nice how the index page can be re-sorted by title, newest, or best.

The notes on each book’s page do often feel more like they’re written for him rather than for another person, since I can’t quite tell if he’s copying & pasting or what, but hey—it’s his site! I’m just glad to poke around what he’s read sometimes!

Tom Critchlow

Tom Critchlow has a number of book-related things in his Jekyll-based wiki, including a page linking to digital bookshelves he admires, a number of other book-related notes, an idea for a JSON-based alternative to Goodreads, and finally, his own books read page.

His summaries are quite brief, and feel written mostly as reminders-to-himself, and I mean that in a way that I appreciate.

Maggie Appleton

Although it’s a prime example of the “mostly an eye-candy grid” approach, I really like the way that Mapple Appleton’s website contains both a library of books she’s “read that significantly influenced” how she sees the world and an antilibrary of books she likes “the idea of having read”.

The idea of giving yourself this antilibrary’s kind of “things I find interesting but probably won’t do” sort of list somehow simultaneously breaks my brain and chills it out. Based on that alone, these pages feel worth mentioning. I also like the selections on each list! I just can’t help but wish she provided her site’s visitors with some kind of annotation or brief snippet of her own thoughts on each. What can I say? I guess I’m nosy, greedy, or probably a bit of both.

Examples of Your Own?

I don’t typically end blog posts with the “what about you, reader?” type of conclusion that seemed very common in the first big wave of blogging I remember reading. Partially that’s because it can sometimes feel formulaic, and partially that’s just because I haven’t always had comments enabled on here.

With this topic, I would certainly love to learn what other people are doing. I’m still curious about other answers to Jacky’s question, so I don’t want to write a “conclusion”—I want to keep the question in play!

Have you seen other great examples? Have you made your own and want to share? Please let me know, here, on Mastodon, or however else makes sense to you.

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