Reading the Word...Reflection on GoodReads

Above you will find my "book montage" of covers from some of the books that I have read and reported on www.GoodReads.com.  This website which is a place to record and rate your reading life was new to me this year.  The process of tracking, publicizing, and quantifying my reading has changed the way that I think about my reading.  This is partly because it has made my reading visible (especially in a montage of all of the covers of the books that I have read).  I have chosen to include it because it provides a catalogue of much of my "word reading" this semester.  But this is more than a list of the books I have read, the practice of making the list has had an impact on me.  This internet application has changed my perception and process by capitalizing on the social aspect of literacy.  Even if the act of posting a book as "read" in my "virtual bookshelf" was social.  As I decided how many stars to give it or marked something as "to read" I did this in the context of my social environment.  As I read the reviews of my friends or my mom asks about the new book I'm reading that she saw in my "feed," these interactions validates my literacy.  Bloome and Solsken (1998) describe that, “Literacy is not a noun or an adjective but a verb…Literacy is an action whereby people use texts to structure relationships with other people and with social institutions.”  I found that the public social sphere helped incentivize my by making it relational.

Another transformational aspect of my GoodReads.com profile was my complex identity that it exposed.  I decided that I wanted to report all of the books that I was reading.  This spring this has been almost entirely comprised of professional texts and children's books.  Yet there are some lingering artifacts on my profile from my winter break beach reading from Thailand like Bangkok 8 and Prep.  My multiple identities and multiple literacies are present in my reading of a diverse cross section of texts.  Even though this virtual "book shelf" displays some diversity in my reading selections, it also paints an interesting picture of who I am.  Literacy and African American adolescent literature are heavily featured as of late.  In the same way that we may be able to make some inferences about a student who is obsessed with fantasy series after fantasy series, I am from this montage some inferences can be made about me.  In the past few months my reading of the word has been deeply intertwined with my desire to soak up as much as I could during my graduate study.