What does your goodreads library say about you?
I’ve been recording the books that I’ve read in a csv since 2017 and decided to switch over to using the Goodreads website in 2019. While I don’t find Goodreads particularly great at recommmending books, I do like the idea of using the data available to better understand reading habits. Before I would painstakingly add genre information and fill out information about the author and book for each entry, but goodreads provides a simple way to export your data.
In order to make the most of the data exported from Goodreads, Paul Klinger made a nice python script to scrap genre information from the website.
Import the data
Booklist <-
read_csv(
here::here(
"content",
"post",
"2021-05-24-what-does-your-goodreads-library-say-about-you",
"goodreads_library_export.csv"
)
)Tidy the data
read_Booklist <- Booklist %>%
subset(Booklist$`Exclusive Shelf` == "read") %>%
mutate(genre_quorum = sub("\\|.*", "", genres))
short_Booklist <- read_Booklist %>%
subset(read_Booklist$Author %in% names(sort(table(Booklist$Author), decreasing = T))[1:30])
#Turning Completion date into a date format R can recognize
read_Booklist$`Date Added` <- as.Date(read_Booklist$`Date Added`,
format = "%y-%m-%d")
read_Booklist$yearmonth <- as.yearmon(read_Booklist$`Date Added`)
read_Booklist$yearmonthf <- factor(read_Booklist$`Date Added`)
#Making a Week number column
read_Booklist$week <-
as.numeric(strftime(read_Booklist$`Date Added`, format = "%V"))
# Making a month number column then creating a factor abbreviated month column. I found the factor step necessary to maintain order
read_Booklist$month <-
as.numeric(strftime(read_Booklist$`Date Added`, format = "%m"))
read_Booklist$monthf <-
factor(
read_Booklist$month,
levels = as.character(1:12),
labels = c(
"Jan",
"Feb",
"Mar",
"Apr",
"May",
"Jun",
"Jul",
"Aug",
"Sep",
"Oct",
"Nov",
"Dec"
),
ordered = TRUE
)
#Repeating above for weekdays
read_Booklist$weekday <-
strftime(read_Booklist$`Date Added`, format = "%w")
read_Booklist$weekdayf <-
factor(
read_Booklist$weekday,
levels = rev(0:6),
labels = rev(c(
"Sun", "Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat"
)),
ordered = TRUE
)
read_Booklist$year <-
strftime(read_Booklist$`Date Added`, format = "%Y")
summarized_Booklist <- read_Booklist %>%
group_by(genre_quorum) %>%
dplyr::summarise(Count = n()) %>%
arrange(-Count)
calendar <- read_Booklist %>%
mutate(monthweek = 1 + week - min(week)) %>%
subset(year > 2017) %>%
mutate(genre_quorum= factor(genre_quorum,levels = summarized_Booklist$genre_quorum))What genres do I tend to reads?
ggplot(data=read_Booklist, aes(x=fct_infreq(genre_quorum))) +
geom_bar(stat="count",fill=c(viridis(33)))+ ylab("Number of Books")+ xlab("Goodreads Genre")+ ggtitle("Distribution of the genre of books I read") + theme_bw() + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust =0.5))
What’s my favorite author?
ggplot(data=short_Booklist, aes(x=fct_infreq(Author))) +
geom_bar(stat="count",fill=c(viridis(29)))+ ylab("Number of Books")+ xlab("Author")+ ggtitle("Authors I've read multiple times") + theme_bw() + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust =0.5))
What do my readings look like?
ggplot(calendar, aes(monthweek, weekdayf)) +
geom_tile(colour = "white", aes(fill = genre_quorum)) +
facet_grid(year ~ monthf, scales = "free") +
labs(x = "Week of Month",
y = "",
title = "Finished Books Heatmap",
subtitle = "Colored by book genre frequency",
fill = "genre_quorum") + theme_bw() + scale_fill_viridis_d() +theme(legend.position = "none", axis.text.x = element_blank(), axis.ticks.x = element_blank())
If you’re interested in questions like, how does my ratings differ than the average or how many pages did I read last year, then try importing your csv into Paul Klinger’s website.
