5 Of My Favourite Features On Goodreads

Last updated on 24 January 2023

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One of my favourite websites for bookish greatness is Goodreads.

If you’re one to keep a track of the books you’ve read, then you’ll already know about and use Goodreads. Even if you’re not into reading, but you’ve been around the blog for a while, then you’ll know that I often bring it up and it’s always linked up on my book reviews.

Some days I wish there were more things you could do on Goodreads, but other days I just get excited about how many books I’ve added to my Want To Read list. There are a few features on Goodreads that I especially enjoy, so I thought I’d share them with you today.

1. Bookshelves

Being able to create bookshelves on Goodreads is brilliant. For the longest time I only used the three that were automatically there (and non-delete-able), which are Currently Reading, Want To Read, and Read. As soon as you finish reading a book, Goodreads automatically moves it to from your Currently Reading to Read so you don’t have to do it. You can also create your own shelves, which is what I’ve done this year to better keep track of a few things. I’ve got a shelf for each of the publishing companies I review books for, as well as an Own It shelf, and things like comic books and graphic novels. Lots of users create shelves for things like ‘YA books released in 2018’ or ‘Books I’m looking forward to in Winter 2019’ etc etc. Super handy for logging titles.

2. Re-read

This feature is relatively new – only last year was it released, and I love it. Okay, so I love the idea of it. I haven’t actually re-read any books, but am looking forward to being able to add a date rather than change the date that’s already connected to it. Before the feature was released you could only have one read date associated with each book, which meant if you re-read your favourite book or your dove into Harry Potter for the hundredth time, it wouldn’t count towards your Goodreads Challenge for that year, unless you changed the date…but if you changed the read date from 2014 to 2018, then it wouldn’t be on your 2014 list anymore…make sense? You can read more about the re-reading function here, but it’s such a great idea!

3. ‘Readers Also Enjoyed’

When you click into a book on Goodreads, one of the additional side-bar sections is called ‘Readers Also Enjoyed’. Under it is, yup you guessed it, other books that are similar in genre or themes that readers liked if they’ve read the book you’re looking at. I’ve found a lot of great books by just having a scroll through the books in this list.

4. Lists

One of the cool things about Goodreads (among many, many cool things) is the ability to create and vote on lists. While I don’t ever make any or vote on lists (if you vote for a book on a certain list, you can bump it up, as it’s listed by popularity), I do use them to find things like ‘Hurry Up and Release It!!!‘ or ‘YA Novels of 2018‘ or ‘2018 Sequels‘ etc. It’s so great to be able to see so many books in the same place, and easily add them to my shelves.

5. Stats

This is a function I only discovered this year. If you go to My Books when you’re logged in, there’s a little link on the right hand side, near the top that says ‘Stats’. When you click into that page, it takes you to a wonderful page of statistics from the books you’ve got records for on Goodreads. It’s sorted into years, and has the number of books that you set for your challenge, which you can then click and a drop down section shows you what books you gave 5 star ratings to, 4 star, and so on. You can change it from books to pages, or publication year. If also gives you fun facts like the longest book you read, and how many books sit on each of your shelves.

Bonus: You can also see other people’s stats, and compare your books with theirs!

Of course there are many over great features of Goodreads, but these are just five of my favourites.

What do you like most about Goodreads? Let me know!