Pleasant Surprise

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

The Reader is the primary reason why I can keep being motivated to blog. Found many nice folks there, and some found me. It gives me likes and comments I didn’t have with my previous blog, which had better SEO and far more visitors.

The Reader link was rebranded from “Read” to an icon some months ago, which made it less recognizable. It’s now back as a O^O Reader. I’m thankful to the folks who put the text back. I hope more bloggers discover it this way because the tool is quickly improving.

New Social Media Accounts

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I’m now on Bluesky and TheStoryGraph.

Bluesky is the new Twitter with everyone seemingly moving there but not really. I want to migrate out of Twitter for some reasons:

  • Twitter doesn’t let me publicize my blog there
  • My thousands of followers there seem to be inactive and never click
  • Twitter seems to be filtering out content that contains outbound links

Two of these do not apply to Bluesky. My user is dzver.bsky.social. I’m not fully committed to the migration but I added Bluesky to my phone. I wouldn’t dare to do that with Twitter.

TheStoryGraph is an alternative to Goodreads. It’s worse in terms of books availability but:

  • It has modern charts
  • Their reading challenge is real
  • It seems to be built by people who read books for people who read books

You could not hope to see anything like that on Goodreads.

Here’s my profile. Getting 1-2 friends there will help me explore the social aspects of this service and see if I can realistically migrate out of Goodreads in the future.

2025 Goodreads Reading Challenge Update

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

Part of the reasons why I read so many books last year was that it was a shared experience, thanks to the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Several friends did it at the same time and I got inspired by their achievements. I would see people setting their annual goals, completing them, and would occasionally check their progress, motivating myself to read more.

Goodreads decided to revamp the reading challenge this year.

  • They removed any possibility to see other people’s reading challenge
  • They replaced the gallery of books with a simple list
  • They added a bunch of new challenges, monthly and genre-specific
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot

I think this series of changes highlights a common problem in software engineering, which is not seeing the product from the point of view of the people who use it:

  • Not seeing the friends’ challenges is not a problem if your Goodreads account has no friends who do the challenge or you don’t do it yourself. In that case other problems appear more prominent, like can we have a single address for the reading challenge? What should it be?
  • In case your personal challenge has some artificial data, like 3-4 books added for tests, it’s not a problem that the new list of books can only fit 4 books on desktop and is 95% white screen.
  • The artificial test account with 3 books would also only have 2-3 of the visible 7 months where we are challenged to read one book per month. It would look great, some challenges accomplished, other not accomplished. Less adequate if you read 5 or 10 books per month and have been consistent over a period of many years.

I hope Goodreads recognizes the issue and iterates on their mistakes. They could follow the example of the Reader Council and ask the community when things are not certain how people use the service.

I’m not yet sure an alternative to my usage of Goodreads exists. Tried Storygraph but it needs time to import my data. Also tried Bookwyrm but it didn’t quite work for me.

Part of what makes Goodreads great is the community – lots of librarians maintain the various editions. It might be difficult to replicate elsewhere.

The Waiting by Michael Connelly, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

The Waiting is Michael Connelly’s 39th book from the Harry Bosch Universe. Renée Ballard from LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit is going to chase a number of different cases at the same time, with the help of Maddie Bosch. Two of the cases are serial killers. Harry Bosch also makes a brief appearance. The avalanche of cases is something we can imagine from an unit that digs into the past and the entire series is plausible. It’s very satisfying because you read about multiple resolutions throughout the book.

Renée Ballard is my current most favorite character by Michael Connelly. She’s experienced but impatient. Doesn’t shy away from yelling at people. Relies on others to do the job. She chills by surfing, which puts her in difficult positions from time to time, including in that book. It starts with the theft of her belongings while surfing. She has no superpowers and doesn’t rely on Deux ex machina to solve the cases. I like the whole setup.

This thriller gets an easy 5*/5 Goodreads rating. It will be a hard thing to read a better book in January. The bar is set high.