Which book was I on? A love letter to not remembering

Real scenario. You loved a series. Life happened — a job, a move, a baby, a video game, whatever. Eight months pass. You want back in.

And you cannot remember whether you read book five.

So you do the thing. You open book five's sample. You read the first page. Nothing. You skim to chapter three. Vaguely familiar? Or is that just what fantasy chapter threes are like? Twenty minutes later you have learned nothing and accidentally spoiled yourself on a character death.

Three states, and that's the whole system

Every book sits in one of three places, and you set it with one tap:

• Read. Done. In the bank. Never think about it again.
• Currently reading. The book you're in right now. Marked so it's obvious the second you open the app.
• Want to read. Queued. Your future self's problem, and your future self will thank you.

Books that aren't out yet get their own state automatically, because "not published" isn't a choice you made, it's a fact about the universe.

That's it. No percentage complete, no page counters, no timers running while you read. I tried building those. They made reading feel like cardio. If you want a stopwatch on your hobby, there are apps for that and I wish them well.

A progress tracker's only real job is answering "where was I?" in under two seconds.

The shortcut for when you've forgotten everything

When you add a series you've already partly read, you don't mark books one through six individually like some kind of clerk. You tell us which one you last read, and everything before it is marked read.

Onboarding a twenty-book backlog goes from twenty taps to one. This is my favourite piece of the whole app and it took forty minutes to build, which is the correct ratio for good features.

Where the data goes

Marking books read isn't bookkeeping for its own sake. It feeds everything else:

• Your dashboard leads with what's actually next for you, not book one of everything.
• Want to read becomes a real queue you can browse when you finish something at 1am and need the next one immediately.
• [Stats](/features/en/reading-stats) — books, pages, hours, top author — all come from these marks. No extra work.
• [Public profiles](/features/en/public-profiles) show what you've read, if you decide to share.

You can also rate books, which is the one place I'll admit to enjoying a number. A year of ratings turns into a surprisingly honest picture of your own taste, including the parts you'd deny at a party.

Optional: a nudge to actually read

There's a reading reminder — daily, weekly or monthly, your call, off unless you turn it on. It exists because the most common way to abandon a book isn't disliking it. It's putting it down on a Tuesday and never picking it up.

A small tap on the shoulder fixes that more often than you'd think. And if it doesn't, turn it off, no hard feelings, the book will wait.