In my last post, I explained to you how I’ve been keeping a reading log to track my goal of reading 100 books this year. And I said that I would explain three ways to modify it to track further variables of your reading plan.

I know that many of you have no concern to even track your reading, much less other aspects of your reading habits. But my life is hectic enough that, if I don’t track how many books I am reading, I can fool myself into thinking that I’m actually reading a good bit when I’m hardly reading at all. So I need to keep track of my reading to keep myself honest about my study habits. (And my job as a minister requires that I constantly educate myself.)

I have also found it useful to track other aspects of my reading. What aspects? There are four of them. Let me explain each aspect and then tell you how to keep track of them on a spreadsheet.

Subject Matter

I have a M.A. in Philosophy, but I work as a minister. So I have a strong interest in philosophy, but my job requires that I read a lot of theology. I don’t want to stop reading and thinking about philosophy, so I find it helpful to keep track of how much philosophy I read and how much theology I read.

Maybe you don’t have a similar need to track various subjects. Or maybe you just want to track how much non-fiction you read compared to how much fiction you read. Whatever the reason, there is a simple way to compare how many books you read in each subject.

First, insert a column into your spreadsheet to keep track of the topic of the book. I have three: Philosophy, Theology, and Other. Each book should get categorized according to the topic. (It’s actually not essential that each book get categorized if the book doesn’t belong to one of the subjects in which you are trying to keep track of your reading. Just leave it blank.)

Second, find some blank cells where you’d like to keep the record of how many books you read in each topic. It’s best to label the cell (e.g. Philosophy Books Read). Then you’d use a SUMIF function to add up the number of books in each topic. If I were going to keep track of my philosophy readings, I’d use the following function:

=SUMIF(H2:H13; “Philosophy”; G2:G13)/250

That formula looks in my Topics column (H2 through H13) and adds up the corresponding page numbers in my Adjusted Page Numbers row if the topic for that row is “Philosophy”. (The reason I divide by 250 is because I defined a book as 250 pages. Read my post on my reading log method to understand why.)

You can use a similar formula for each topic to see how it compares. I can glance at my reading log and see that I’ve read 13 more books in theology than in philosophy. Next book I pick up will be philosophy.

Depth of Reading

You shouldn’t be reading easy books all the time. And you shouldn’t be superficially reading books or reading passively. It is important to read deeply in some books, thinking about what is said and annotating the book. So you might want to track how deeply you read. You could do this two ways.

First, you could just average the Difficulty Level of your books. (See my post on my reading log if you don’t know what that is.) Trying to average 2 or higher would make you read less superficially.

Or you could just count how many books you read at the various levels. The easiest way would be using a COUNTIF function. You would use that function on your Difficulty Level column and see how many times you read at the various difficulty levels. (I trust you can figure out how to set up the function yourself.)

Am I Reading Classics?

C. S. Lewis recommended that the average Christian should try to read older books as often as you read newer books. Specifically, he said that we should try to read one book from a previous century for every new book we read. I think this is a very wise discipline to have.

But how can you ensure that you are reading older books? Just create a column on your spreadsheet entitled Year Written. When you record a book, enter what year it was written. (I know that was obvious.)

Then you can use the COUNTIF function you used in the last modification. But this time you will count how many books you have that were were written before 1900. Your function might look like this:

=COUNTIF(D2:D13; “<1901″)

(Where D2:D13 is the column you record the year the book was written.)

Then you could compare this number to your total number of books you’ver read. That would give you a clue as to whether you were reading enough older books.

Conclusion

I don’t know if you find these modifications of the reading log useful. Most of you won’t. But they can be helpful if you are trying to monitor what kind of books you read or how deeply you read. It might seem like a lot of work. True! But reading is important, so why not track your reading the way a runner would track his running. And many runners track their running with an insane amount of detail.

So the spreadsheet gives you options that would be tedious by hand. For those of us who are nerds and/or autodidacts, this can be useful.