I’m trying to set up some Dataview queries to track reading. In essence to replace Goodreads.
I am a heavy daily notes user and most everything stems from there.
Essentially, if I start, complete or find a book to read, I’ll add an entry on my daily note. Examples:
Completing a book
#### 10:55 PM - Completed [[We Are Legion]]
Date:: [[2021.09.18]]
Medium:: Book
Title:: [[We Are Legion]]
Author:: [[Dennis E. Taylor]]
Series: [[Bobiverse]]
Status:: Completed
Notes: This book was a book. It has pages in it.
Rating:: 3
Starting a new book
#### 10:57 PM - Started [[For We Are Many]]
Date:: [[2021.09.18]]
Medium:: Book
Title:: [[For We Are Many]]
Series: [[Bobiverse]]
Author:: [[Dennis E. Taylor]]
Status:: Reading
Future Reading
#### 10:59 PM - Want to Read [[All These Worlds]]
Date:: [[2021.09.18]]
Medium:: Book
Title:: [[All These Worlds]]
Series: [[Bobiverse]]
Author:: [[Dennis E. Taylor]]
Status:: ToRead
The issue I’m running into is that if I add two (or more) books to the same daily note (say finish and start one on the same day), neither will show on my dataview query.
Example Dataview query (To Read List)
```dataview
table Title, Author
where Medium = "Book" and !contains(file.name, "Book Entry") and contains(Status, "ToRead")
SORT file.ctime asc
```
This works if there is only one entry per day.
Is there a way to show multiple entries on a single dataview query?
Now I’m seeing a flaw in my system; Unless I go back to the original daily note to make changes to the Status, these lists will forever grow. Hmm, back to the drawing board.
I’m trying to avoid a note per book as that’s (eventually) a lot of notes with just metadata.
just a random thought, if you made a note for each book but wrote a short review or opinion of the book once read that would justify the individual note per book to me rather than just metadata.
Edit: you could also use this as a way to go back and see what your opinion was in the past vs a re-read. That could be interesting I think. Obviously this is a very long term related thing but I think thats what second brain is about right?
This was my original plan, but have realized I rarely write notes/reviews and if I do it’s less than a paragraph. Regardless, I have switched back to per-book-notes as it’s much easier to maintain everything I want to do. I figured I don’t read enough books to sweat the extra files.
The real goal was to make it easier to maintain via mobile. Just adding a template to my (likely already existent daily note) is simpler on mobile, but only by a small margin.