Recently, I have been working on simplifying my notes in Obsidian1. One of the things I have wanted to do for a while is make the list of books I’ve read since 1996 available in simple way that is easy to maintain, but extensible, so that I can eventually include notes about books I’ve read. So I subscribed to the Obsidian Publish service, and after experimenting with various formats, decided to keep things very simple and created a page that lists what I have read since 19962.
The result looks something like this (which may evolve over time, especially if you are reading this post sometime after 15 November 2022):
Some elements of the new reading list:
- Clicking on the “Guide to the reading list” will provide some additional information about what appears on the list.
- The entire list of everything I’ve read since 1 January 1996 is in a single page. However, you can jump to a given year using the index at the top of the page.
- At the beginning of each year is a “Year in review” section in which I list notable reading-related things for that year. As of this writing, I have not yet completed these for every year on the list.
- Some book titles contain links to notes about the book in question. These links are mostly just stubs at this point, as I play around with how I want to manage this.
Reading stats
I’ve also added a reading stats page, which has some basic year-by-year stats for the reading that I do. Over time, I see the information on this page growing, almanac-like to cover various aspects of what I’ve read.
Now
Finally, I’ve added what I call a “now” page that lists things I’m working on now, and things I’m currently reading. This is a conventient place to direct people from various online profiles. (You can see it, for instance, in my Twitter profile, for as long as that remains actively useful.)
The reading list site is in its most basic form right now and I see if growing and evolving over time. I’ll post significant updates here on the blog. But you can see more detailed information on the Reading List change log.
Written on 15 November 2022.
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- Details in a future post. ↩
- Technical detail for those interested in such things: I’ve hosted my reading list in various places online since the late 1990s. The URL has therefore changed over the years. One of the things I wanted to do with this effort was have a single URL on my site that I could in the future no matter where my list was actually hosted. So I created a stub page in WordPress at the following URL: https://jamierubin.net/reading-list/. On this URL, I setup a redirect that takes you to where my list is hosted on my Obsidian Publish site: https://notes.jtrwriter.com/reading/lists/reading-list. I did this so that what I link to my list in the future, I can link the the short WordPress link, and it will always point to the current location of my reading list, no matter where it is hosted. End technical note. ↩
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You know what? I think this post has inspired me to finally embark on the journey or creating my own list…
Eagerly awaiting further posts on your Obsidian simplification journey!