GoodReadance 2021: Goodreads Spring Cleaning

Hi all!

So it’s officially spring! The flowers are blooming, my hayfever is acting up, and the magpies are out and swooping and trying to claw out your eyes. Just another lovely spring season in Australia.

Spring is also a good time to clean and the perfect time to clean out those Goodreads shelves. Thankfully, Shealea created the #GoodReadance Challenge to do just that: clean out your Goodreads shelves!

I haven’t done this in a really long time and was surprised by how convoluted my shelves had become. I’ve always had a lot of Goodreads shelves but when I went through them now, I realised a lot of them were quite similar. So this challenge came at a good time! Thanks Shealea!

What I decided to for this #Goodreadance was to re-organise my Goodreads bookshelves and go through all the books on my Want To Read shelf and remove any I’m no longer interested in.

I don’t have a number in mind for books that I want to read, but I want to try to get it down as much as I can.

Let’s see how I went!

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So as you can see, I removed 140 books from my shelves! That’s a lot and I’m quite proud of myself.

Exclusive shelves

• Read: I removed a bunch of issues from a comic I read and changed my review to the volumes instead, so that’s why my read books dropped from 1412 to 1403
• Want to Read: From 479 to 402!
• Did Not Finish & Hiatus: You’ll see that I removed my Hiatus shelf just because all the books on there I haven’t gone back to in YEARS. So I can’t actually call it a hiatus when it’s more like I DNF’d them. So I combined the Hiatus shelf to my Did Not Finish.
• On My Radar and Maybe: I decided to remove this shelf when I went through the books and realised I was interested in perhaps 5 out of the 32 on there. Plus, I have the Unreleased shelf, which serves a very similar function. Maybe shelf was very, very similar to On My Radar, and I really don’t need two shelves that are basically the same!
• Read next: I originally made this shelf to serve as a reminder for which books I wanted to read next, but I never looked at this shelf! So it basically served no function. Those books just got moved to my Want to Read shelf.
• TBR 2021: I have a shelf like this and change it up every year to serve as my tentative TBR for the year. I moved some of the books over to Want to Read because I felt like I wasn’t going to read many of them by the end of the year.
• Unreleased: A shelf for books that haven’t been released yet. When they’re published, I move them over to Want to Read if I still find them interesting.
• Year in Review: A shelf for those “year in review” things on Goodreads.
• Classics Club TBR: I used to have this as a normal shelf but I since changed that to an exclusive one. I’m part of the Classics Club, an online club where you have to read 50 classics books in 5 years. I decided to make this shelf an exclusive one because then I can move them over to Read once finished.
• Series to finish: I also used to have this shelf as a normal one but made it exclusive, as I realised I haven’t been finishing a lot of the series I’m reading! So hopefully by making this an exclusive shelf, it will remind me to finish those series.

Remaining shelves

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• Australian author: I removed this shelf because I realised it was a bit redundant because it didn’t categorise any novel, it was just the nationality of an author
• Star ratings: I also went through all of my read books and changed some star ratings! As you can see, a lot has changed. My 5 star ratings dropped from 327 to 296 — which is a massive amount! Basically, I saw a lot of books rated 5 stars that I don’t remember that much about 😅 so obviously I had to change the rating for those
• Best gay rep: I removed this shelf because I kept forgetting to add to it, and I really couldn’t be bothered to go through my shelves and add more books to it!
• Borrow box: I removed this shelf because I always look at the BorrowBox app to see if there’s a book on there before buying a book anyway

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• Libro-FM: I removed this shelf because, like BorrowBox, I check the app regularly for books to read
• My OTPs: I removed this shelf because I thought it was a bit silly. If I loved a book a lot anyway, then it would probably be in my Favourites, Books I Will Never Forget, or Ultimate Best shelves anyway
• New Adult: I thought this shelf was unnecessary because all of the books I consider Adult anyway, so I just moved them to other shelves
• Plays: Why do I have a shelf for 1 book? Lol

Final results

• I went from 11 exclusive shelves to 9
• I went from 62 other Goodreads shelves to 53
• My average rating went from 3.67 to 3.64 — which is surprising, I thought it would have dropped more
• I went from 479 books to read to 402

I think this was a pretty successful #Goodreadance! I’m very happy with how my shelves turned out. Are you going to be participating in this challenge too? Let me know!