Introducing my book log

I am pleased to introduce a new member to my little family of personal websites:

Ian Beck's Book Log
http://log.beckism.com/

It includes short reviews and complete plot summaries for the books that I am reading, with the goal being to post them as I read them. I created the site for a couple reasons:

  1. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, which means I read a lot of sequels. However, except for series that I have re-read countless times because I love them so much, I tend to forget what has happened. My book log is thus a resource for myself to look up the plot summary for books that I don’t want to re-read before I proceed in the series.
  2. I like sharing my opinions about books, but have never found a place conducive to doing so regularly (I’ve done it on this blog in the past, but since I wanted a resource for all the books I’m reading, it would have just polluted Beckism.com and caused me no end of trouble when it came to searching for old books).

In any case, if you enjoy science fiction or fantasy, check it out! Even if not, take a gander; it’s one of my nicer-looking sites, and I’d love to hear what you like (or don’t) about it.

I’m planning to post about some of the technical problems I ran into developing the site and how I addressed them, but I’ll leave that for another day. In the meantime, enjoy a couple of recommendations for great books, and some scathing commentary on the not-so-great ones!

2 responses to “Introducing my book log”

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  1. Dan States says:

    WHy not use GoodReads ? It’s an amazing platform

    • Ian Beck says:

      I looked into GoodReads prior to starting my book log, and have three reasons I chose to avoid it:

      1. GoodReads does not support full plot summaries, and is an inappropriate place to post them in any case
      2. If I post to GoodReads, I lose control of my post. If GoodReads closes its doors, all that data goes away and I can no longer reference it.
      3. GoodReads has too much going on, to the point that I’m overwhelmed whenever I try to use the site.

      GoodReads is a great platform for discovering books and authors and leaving reviews, but was pretty inappropriate for what I was trying to do.

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