Bossing Some TBRs + Streamlining Bookish Problems (S9E10)

The Currently Reading Podcast

Hosts Meredith Munday-Schwartz and Katie Cobb tackle reader conundrums like managing massive digital libraries and finding local reading communities before diving

Key takeaways

• Meredith created a spreadsheet cross-referencing her Kindle library with Goodreads ratings to filter unread books by genre and quality, solving the 'treasure trove' problem of digital reading.
• Katie tested reader dating apps after a New York Times article but found them unusable due to extreme age gaps and unrealistic distance matching (1,389 kilometers away).

Main topics

• Digital library management & Kindle optimization
• Reader dating apps & local community building

Notable quotes

I read over 2,400 pages of Crescent City, and I read them all back to back. Literally no days in between.

Conclusion

Listeners gain practical strategies for organizing their reading habits

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:10) Hey readers, welcome to the Currently Reading Podcast. We are bookish best friends who spend time every week talking about the books that we've read recently. And as you know, we won't shy away from having strong opinions. So get ready. We are light on the chit chat, heavy on the book Speaker 3 (0:27) talk, and our conversations will always be spoiler free. Today Speaker 1 (0:30) we'll discuss our current reads, a readerly deep dive, and a little something bookish before we go. I'm Meredith Munday-Schwartz. I'm both a mom and a Mimi and a full-time CEO living in Austin, Texas. And sometimes I am such a smarty pants. Speaker 3 (0:44) Ooh, and I'm Katie Cobb, a single homeschooling mom of four in Arizona. And the bookish friends never fail me. This is episode number 10 of season nine. And we are so glad you're here. Meredith, I would disagree. And I would say all the time, you are such a smarty pants because I am just, I'm so lucky. to get to know you and work with you and benefit from your genius. Speaker 1 (1:05) Yeah. Well, you need to talk to Mr. John Schwartz, who knows that I absolutely am not a smarty pants all the time because I'm constantly walking up to him with some amount of food and an empty container and saying, baby, will this fit in this? He's like, oh, no, that's not going to fit at all. And I'm like, OK, I'll go try again. Like I have no I'm a dummy on some things, but. I do feel smart for the thing that I came up with this week. Okay, I'm excited Speaker 3 (1:34) to hear about it. Y'all, today for our deep dive, we are going to boss some new victims into their TBR, their next picks for their next reads. But first, we have a bit of mischief to manage, which we only do once a month here on Currently Reading. As you know, we are ad-free all the time, except for on the first Monday of the month when we have an ad for ourselves. So we are going to toss it over to one of our bookish friends who can't wait to tell you why she loves supporting Currently Reading podcast. Speaker 2 (2:05) Hi, my name is Morgan. I'm from Illinois, but currently living in Maine, and I've been a fan of Currently Reading since day one. Some people might say that my prior friendships with Katie and Meredith make me biased, but I truly don't think they do. I just love Currently Reading and the show and the formats and that it's ad-free. I really love that it's ad-free. But even more, I love that me being able to spend that $5 a month supports a wonderful team of women who are just doing their best to support their communities and talk about books and bookish lives and make this show the best they can for our entertainment. So I would support their show for those reasons alone. And so knowing that I get the bookish community and the best friends I've made through the show and the reading tracker and the extra shows and the... support for indie bookstores. All of that to me is just acing on the cake. So I hope for any of those reasons, you also consider joining. And if you don't like it, you can cancel. But I think once you join, you'll love it. And if you do join and you join the bookish community on Facebook or any of the others and I'm there, don't hesitate to reach out. I look forward to Speaker 1 (3:12) seeing you. Bye. All right. We are so appreciative of our bookish friends. Thank you so much. Speaker 3 (3:18) Yes, it's so good to hear from you and what you love about being behind the paywall. Of course, as a reminder, you can always join us over on patreon.com slash currently reading podcast for just $5 a month. You get all that great content, our amazing bookish friends community, and you keep this show otherwise commercial free. That's our mischief managed. Meredith, let's get into our bookish moments. Why are you such a smarty pants? All Speaker 1 (3:43) right. I was having a problem in that. I was, I knew that I wanted to choose my next book and I knew I wanted to be on my Kindle. But every time I go to do that, I, you know, I have hundreds and hundreds of books on my Kindle. And I'm always like, I just feel like I can't search it. I can't properly make a choice there. So I was like, but a Kindle is in a lot of ways, just a USB drive. So I was like, what if I connected my Kindle to my Mac and downloaded. the title information from the books that I have there, and then cross-reference that with Goodreads ratings. And then I could say, give me all my unread books and sort them by Goodreads rating. And so that's what I did. And then I was able to go, oh, this book that I had, like, oh, and I was like, oh, and by the way, toss out anything with fewer than 100 ratings. Because then the ratings, if it's fewer than 100, the ratings are like... Wishy-washy. Yeah, it can throw the rating off. But then I was like, now I'm able to say, okay, of the 759 books that I have on my Kindle, I was then able to figure out, and I was also able to create a spreadsheet so then I could sort it by genre. So I was like, I'm in the mood for a mystery, but I want it to be like a really good quality mystery. And so then with this spreadsheet, I was able to do that. And I just felt like such a smarty pants. So now when I go to choose a book on my Kindle, I go to my spreadsheet first and I take a look at that and I cross-reference it and say like, okay, what am I in the mood for? What is the highest rated that, you know, like, and then from there I can go by vibes, right? I can go by like, what do I feel like? But it just made me feel a lot more in control of my Kindle. I Speaker 3 (5:36) like that. conundrum that I find with my Kindle is, A, we say this all the time, this is where books go to die, right? Because there's not a physical representation of them somewhere in the world. Speaker 2 (5:46) And in my Libro Speaker 3 (5:47) .fm account, where I also have in the hundreds number of books, because we get so many great Speaker 2 (5:52) galleys over there, plus my credits, plus the world of Libro. Speaker 3 (5:56) I have dealt with that with my game of late called Reader Roulette, right, where I can just swipe the screen and kind of see where it ends. And then I have this limited number of six titles on a screen. And I say one of these is going to be my next read. And that's a variety of genres. And it's different covers. And there's all kinds of reasons. I might pick any of those. But there's no flick on a Kindle. It's like one page at a time. And you get those six books. And then you look at the next. six or whatever the number is. And that spontaneity plus decision autonomy is what I'm missing. So if you could fix that for me. Speaker 1 (6:34) Well, I mean, you could just like close your eyes and click the button 13 times and then like say, I'm going to pick from the six that are on my screen. Yeah. Speaker 3 (6:43) I Speaker 1 (6:44) mean, I don't know why anyone would decide on a book like that. That's not how I would. But then I wouldn't do the swipe. I wouldn't do the swipe thing. Speaker 3 (6:51) Yeah, it's like the right amount of moodiness plus control. You did choose all of those books, right? Exactly, right. It's not that Libro sent me 30 galleys. It's that every month I look at the 100 and I choose 10 that I'm interested in. And the same on Kindle, right? Like, it's not like they just showed up there. It's usually at least Indie Press List or some other reason that I picked up that book. So it's not like this is going to be garbage, hopefully. But I need some way to like get into the treasure trove that's behind there. And Speaker 2 (7:25) honestly, Speaker 3 (7:27) I do feel like the bookish friends could solve this because the bookish friends never fail me. So I'm looking forward to their solutions here. But what I'm doing for my bookish moment today is I'm following up on the last time that you and I recorded together, Meredith, and we ended up talking about reader dating apps, right? Our listeners are so good. and they followed up almost immediately. We got DMs and emails that same morning and all week long, especially because there had just been an article in the New York Times about a new dating app for readers. That one that was highlighted in that article was only available on iOS devices, so I downloaded two others as an Android user for quality control checks. I will not pan them publicly here with their names on the show, but suffice to say, that one only had 70-year-olds for me to choose from, which is not my cup of tea for dating at this time in my life, and one was matching me with people 1,389 kilometers away, neither of which was sustainable for Speaker 1 (8:26) me. Neither Speaker 3 (8:27) of those is a good option for me. Of course, this got me thinking about how readers find other readers locally, especially within the even more niche realm of readers who are single and available and... of a certain age looking for other readers who are single and available and of a certain age, right? Like how do you narrow the funnel appropriately to find those people and also have a big enough user base to have real options when you're trying to grow in-person connections? And this is true, not just in the realm of dating. It's true within other, we've talked about reader profiles and connections in other ways as well. Like how do you find the readers who would make a good book club that also happen to be in your neighborhood, you just have never made that connection with them before. So I have been thinking about this a lot over the course of this past week, especially, and making in-person community or relationships happen around reading. Is it, you know, this can only get deployed in a single metro area for a while until we grow it. And then you can expand to other large metro areas. Or is it that you need a user base that already exists somewhere? Like all of Match.com that has said they're interested in reading will get a targeted ad to move over. I don't know, but it's one of those things that I've been thinking about. How do you make those connections, either friendships or dating relationships, happen within the subset of a subset of a subset of a community and make it big enough to be worth your time? Because that's where this... failed for me. Speaker 1 (10:00) Right. That's disappointing that those two failed in those two really key ways. Speaker 3 (10:05) Yeah. And it was like two very different fails. Speaker 1 (10:08) Yeah. I'm sorry, Katie. I don't need Speaker 3 (10:11) somebody 30 years my senior and I don't need somebody that lives a whole world away from me. Neither of those is an option. Speaker 1 (10:19) I'm totally on the market for a 70 year old. I'm good with a silver fox. Speaker 3 (10:24) Honestly, if he looks like Paul Hollywood. Sure. I'd be fine Speaker 2 (10:28) with it. That's not what I was seeing. Speaker 3 (10:30) But we are making connections with our books. So let's talk about some current reads. Meredith, what is your first one this week? Speaker 1 (10:37) Okay. My books this week are a whole situation. I had to bring a meh book, which I haven't actually done in a really long time. You know that we try not to bring meh books, right? Give me good, give me bad, but something in the middle, you know, but I had to, I had to bring one. But I think it could be a hit with a lot of other people. This is a book called The Rage of Plum Blossoms by Christine M. Whitehead. You haven't read this one, have you, Katie? No, but this was a listener press, if I'm remembering Speaker 3 (11:04) correctly, right? Speaker 1 (11:05) Yeah. And it's a really, really good recommendation. So that's why I wanted to bring it because I think it could find a lot of readers who would like it. And it's got a really great premise. Our lead character is Quinn Jones. She's married, happily married to a guy that she really, really, really loved. His name was Jordan Chang. He was an Annapolis grad, a very, very incredibly successful businessman and the absolute love of Quinn's life. Then he turns up dead on the sidewalk outside their Greenwich Village brownstone and nothing about his death adds up. He's wearing clothes that aren't his and he was last seen in a part of the city that he had no reason to be in. keeping company that he had no business keeping. And it turns out he was also far richer than Quinn ever knew. So the NYPD takes one look and stamps the whole thing as suicide, because of course they do. Quinn doesn't buy it for a second, because of course she doesn't. She's an attorney, not an investigator, and she has no earthly idea what she's doing. But she's the one person who at this point cares enough to dig deeper for the truth. So she starts pulling threads, a photograph of a beautiful woman she's never seen and an old check made out to Jordan for a fortune and follows them straight into the back streets of Chinatown to find out who her husband really was. Right. It's a great premise, right? This was a perfectly good mystery. It wasn't boring. I finished it and did not feel like it wasted my time. Just wasn't the kind of book that. I'm going to remember for a really long time. This came to me from, like I said, a listener press, but I also had somebody else recommend it to me who knew my taste really well. And I can see exactly why people recommend it. A twisty amateur sleuth kind of mystery is one that I often really like. I did it on audio and I actually felt that it was, it was really good on audio. It was a good production in a lot of ways. And I finished it in just two long drives, but. It had a very mushy middle, a really mushy stretch, the kind that just made me kind of feel like the air was coming out of the tires. It's really plot heavy. And I think at a certain point, it was bending under its own weight. There was just a lot going on. There were a lot of pieces to this puzzle and not in a way that kept things kind of whirring along in a way that kind of, for me, weighed them down. It does speed back up again toward the end. And I felt that it had a good ending, wrapped things up really nicely. But that dip in the middle was just really, really hard for me to ignore. The prose quality, I found myself just kind of tripping over to the point where it was taking me out of the story. It wasn't horrible, but it was not great enough that I was noticing it. So that was something that definitely was an issue for me. And in the audio production, which I did think was good, it was interesting, though, that there were multiple times. where it was almost like the audio wasn't edited. Because like there were multiple times where the narrator stopped and said, I'm