How I Track my Reading: Introducing StoryGraph

The App That Knows Me Better Than I Know Myself

If you are not already using StoryGraph, the short version is this: it is a book tracking app that lets you log what you are reading, rate what you have finished, and tag books by mood and pace. It also gives you end-of-year stats, personalized recommendations, and enough reading data to make you feel like a very literary scientist studying yourself. It is free, it is not Goodreads, and it is genuinely great.

I have been using it for several years now. And in that time, I have proven myself to be a deeply inconsistent person. I do not post on this blog on any kind of schedule. My Libby holds expire unread before I ever get to them. I have started more reading challenges than I have finished, and I feel exactly zero guilt about that.

But do I log every single book I complete in StoryGraph? Without fail. Every time. Non-negotiable.

I have no explanation for why this particular habit stuck when so many others haven’t. It just did. And honestly, I’m glad, because years of data have turned into something genuinely interesting.

What I Actually Use It For

I want to be upfront: I do not use the daily reading tracker. Logging how many minutes I read today is a bridge too far for me. The app will happily tell you things like “days to completion” for a given book, but since I’m not tracking daily reading, that metric is essentially decorative in my case. I made peace with this a long time ago.

What I do love is the end-of-year stats. Every year, I get a little picture of my own reading habits, and it is always more interesting than I expect. A clear one is that I tend to reach for heavier, meatier books in the winter and lighter reads in the spring and summer. I did not consciously decide to do that. Apparently my brain just knows what it needs depending on the season, and it has been quietly acting on that information without consulting me. However, my favourite kind of insight is the stuff you would never have noticed on your own. For example, last year I read 45 new-to-me authors. This seems both high and low, and worthy of contemplation.

It tells me that my all-time most-read mood is emotional and my all-time most-read genre is contemporary. Which, fine. I am a basic bitch and I have made peace with it.

This year, though, both of those have flipped to funny and thriller. Whether that says something meaningful about my current headspace or just about the books I happened to pick up first, I genuinely cannot tell you. But I find it interesting that the app can.

The Part That Is Genuinely Uncanny

Here is the thing I really want to talk about, because I cannot stop thinking about it.

StoryGraph has a personalized recommendations feature, and I don’t know what is powering it, but it is scarily accurate. It tells me, based on my current mood and reading history, whether it thinks I’ll like a given book. And it is right. Consistently, uncomfortably right.

What gets me is how nuanced it is. It is not just working off my all-time history. It picks up on recent trends, the stuff I’ve been drawn to lately, and weighs that differently than my longer-term patterns. So if I’ve been on a thriller kick for the past two months, it knows that. But it also knows that I have liked certain kinds of thrillers over the years and not others, and it factors both things in.

I am half convinced it knows things like what time of day I’m browsing. That sounds unhinged. I cannot prove it. But when I’m looking at books late at night versus on a Sunday afternoon, the vibe of what it surfaces feels different, and the suggestions feel right for that specific moment. Maybe that is the algorithm. Maybe that is my imagination. Either way, it works.

I do not know what magic was put into this. I am not asking questions. I am just going to keep trusting it.

The Unfussed Take

If you are not tracking your reading somewhere, I would genuinely encourage you to try it. Not because you need more data in your life, but because a few years of honestly logged books will teach you things about your own taste that you would never have figured out on your own. Apparently I am an emotional contemporary girlie who hibernates with big serious books in January and floats through spring on something light and funny. I would never have put that together myself.

And if you do use StoryGraph, lean into the personalized section. Let it be weird and specific and a little too accurate. That is the whole point.

Unfussed Homework (Optional, Obviously)

If you track your reading somewhere, go look at your last year of data and find one thing that surprised you. If you don’t track at all, think about why not. Is it the effort, the pressure, or just that you’ve never felt the need? Either answer is valid, but it’s worth knowing which one it is.