How I organize my Goodreads shelves

Hello there! Saw a post over at In Love & Words, and thought it was a good idea, so here goes. It’s definitely a work-in-progress because I’m always adding or modifying shelves, but as of this year, this is how I organize my Goodreads shelves:

Mutually Exclusive Shelves

Read

This one’s pretty self-explanatory..

Currently Reading

Anything that I’m actively reading – I usually switch back and forth between the books that are on this shelf.

Current count = 6

Want to Read

Pretty much my TBR list. I need to pare this down soon though, because it’s unrealistically populous.

DNF

I rarely decide to NEVER finish a book, EVER. Normally, I just leave my bookmark and then pick it back up at a later time (could be years later – even without a bookmark, I’m usually pretty good at remembering where I left off, when it comes to novels).

So this shelf is pretty sparse – I currently only have 5 books on this shelf.

Pending Review

I just added this shelf this year, after I made the resolution to write a review on every book I’ve read. I file all the books that I’ve read but haven’t written a review for yet under this shelf.

The only reason I make this shelf exclusive is so that books I haven’t reviewed aren’t added to my challenge, and it’s a way to trick/motivate myself into writing a review ASAP so it counts towards my annual Goodreads challenge.

Suspended

Okay, so I have this problem of starting multiple books and reading them all at once. I’m pretty abusive of my pretty good memory when it comes to plots, so I start a bunch of books, sometimes not even bothering to use a bookmark.

I’m one of those people who go to the bookstore, and pull out a bunch of books from the shelves then goes and sits at a table going through the books – I usually read the first couple of chapters. So some of my books on this shelf are accounted for by that #bookbrowsing reading habit of mine.

Some of it is accounted for by those books I actually am currently reading but decided to put off finishing for a while. The current count is 21 (add that to the 6 I’m currently reading, and my true list of current reads is 27) which is why I decided to make this separate shelf, because I just don’t want to be seeing that big number on my current shelf each time I want to update a book status.

Other Shelves

These are the work-in-progress shelves. These are more like tags:

All-time-favorites

Pretty self-explanatory, right? This isn’t necessarily based on my star ratings, but there is likely a direct correlation…

ARCs

I have two shelves for these:

• arcs includes ALL advance reading copies I receive through Netgalley or Edelweiss or BookishFirst
• arc queue include all books under the arc shelf that I still have to read – this shelf helps me keep track of which arcs I should be reading next/top priority (sorted by publication date – doesn’t always work because some pub dates on Goodreads are incorrect or nonexistent). Also reminds me that I should STOP requesting so many. Current count = 39

By genre

• fiction
• nonfiction
• classics
• biographies
• true stories (mostly anthology of stories, ex. Chicken Soup for the Soul)
• action adventure
• children’s
• christian
• contemporary
• dystopian
• fantasy
• magical realism / urban fantasy
• poetry
• romance
• scifi
• self-development
• superheroes
• supernatural
• thriller

By Subscription Box

I have two shelves for Owlcrate and Fairyloot – I also note (under the Notes column) for which month and year and the theme of that particular box.

Miscellaneous

• books I’ve read in HS and college have their own shelves
• books I’ve read for different book clubs have their own shelves
• favorite series
• favorite manga series
• a movie shelf for anything that has a film adaptation I’ve seen

Well, I think that’s it! If you’ve reached this point, thank you so much for sticking around ❤

Would love to hear how you organize yours!