Reading Timeline

By John Brosz

This webapp will give you a simple visualization of when you've finished reading books. It is designed to work with data exported from GoodReads but will work with any CSV file where you have separate columns with headers (first row) labelled "Date Read", "Title", and "Author l-f". It will also show a scatterplot comparing the date read to the publication year (your CSV must include a column "Original Publication Year").

Data can be exported from GoodReads by browsing to "My Books -> Import and export" and pressing the "Export Library" button. As of 2018, this no longer works as well as it did because GoodRead's export does not completely populate the "Date Read" column for books entered 2018 and onward (it's a known problem that they are not particularly interested in fixing).

This site does not upload or save your data, it entirely remains within your browser on your computer. If you would like to try with someone else's data you can use this example file.

If you have any questions or feedback, please contact me at [email protected].

To get started, load your GoodReads csv data: