I do. In late 2017, someone asked me how much I read. My answer was, “A lot, I guess?!?!?!??” That person mentioned Goodreads. I became curious about how much read and started tracking through Goodreads in 2018. I’ve kept at it ever since for three reasons. First, it’s much easier to find and give recommendations to people when I have them all in one place. Someone will want a book about xx and I’ll remember something I read last year. Second, I believe reading is about comfort and escapism but also about learning and expanding yourself. So, I use my list to make sure I’m branching out from time to time. For instance, right now I am in a paranormal/fantasy rut. I’ve read a lot of that so far this year. Honestly, that’s my go-to comfy place. However, it’s also not the place where my favorites come from (contradictory and odd, I know but that’s me). I know that means I need to shake it up a bit for my next couple books. Third, I like the feeling of accomplishment when I meet my goal (usually about November). I set my goal at a very reasonable level but one that I can quickly get way behind if take too time off for very long.

Goodreads is a good platform for tracking books for ease of use if you are just wanting to track the books. It is very easy to look up info on the books you are thinking of and look at reviews. They also have a feature to let you create a Want to Read list which is a great feature until you start entering into their giveaway drawings. They automatically put any books you register for onto your Want to Read list. Since I go in and throw my name in Willy nilly sometimes (because, why not), my Want to Read list is kinda useless now.

You mentioned using it to look so you ‘can interrogate it and find interesting patterns/insights’. That would probably be the biggest part Goodreads is lacking. Any patterns and insights you gain would be from your own analysis. Now if your creative and meticulous, you can use Goodreads to make it easier for you to do your analysis. Goodreads allows you to create ‘bookshelves’ of your choosing. I’ve always done one for the year. You could probably do multiple bookshelves to group books in different ways to analyze them - genre, length, etc. It could make your list of bookshelves unwieldy rather quickly but is actually a very intriguing idea. Also, unless you put them in the reviews, there’s no way that I know of to keep a list of notes/quotes for the books you’ve read.