A Library Without Walls🔗

My grandfather's library🔗

I grew up among books. Both of my parents were teachers and avid readers. My sister is also a teacher and a book lover. When she has time, she posts amazing articles about books and book series on plenty of different topics. It's easy for her: she reads at an incredible speed. Her blog, Katherine's Bookstore is in Hungarian, but even with built-in translation, it's a treasure trove.

My maternal grandfather’s library always fascinated me. It was a space where every part of the wall that wasn’t a door or window was covered by his handmade bookshelves up to the ceiling. Even the outer sides of his large Art Deco desk were covered by a shelf. When you entered, the shelves stretched above your head. You literally entered through a hole in the bookshelf.

The smell of the books and the silence made the room timeless. He had a wide range of interests. I remember finding the 1981 edition of The Lord of the Rings on his shelf by chance one day. I had never heard of it before, and I'm glad I discovered it on my own before the media hype.

As a child, I was certain I would have a library like his someday. That will never happen, for two reasons.

First, I feel that too many objects tie me down and put my ability to move when I need to at risk. Both branches of my family have experienced losing almost everything they owned. Given the current political climate, I am no more protected from this than pulling up a bad Chance card in Monopoly.

Second, in a way, it already exists. My grandfather’s library wasn’t just defined by its size. What mattered was that he had chosen every book himself. When I moved to Finland, I sold two-thirds of my books. I couldn’t have managed the shipping or storage of all of them. So every book I have with me now, even if it was a gift before, is one I have chosen myself.

To ensure that what I let go of isn’t lost, I have my list of books I’ve read.

Virtual books🔗

I joined a book-themed social media platform sixteen years ago. It was fun. I did a lot of community work there by scanning covers and adding new books along with all metadata. The platform wasn't perfect, but it was great for keeping track and sharing my experiences.

I love lists, and I also love checking what I read during the year. It makes me remember how the year went. I could record quotes from the books and take part in challenges too.

But the larger the platform grew, the less personal it became. The site became brutally ad-infested, and it became so popular that publishing companies and authors started to upload their work directly, and I just uploaded my stats to it.

I lost the excitement of being the first to add a new book. And even if you had something rare that was missing, the sheer amount of metadata required to upload a new book became so much that it took about 40-60 minutes to produce that. Then there came a lengthy approval process from the site admins.

I felt that I couldn't contribute anymore and also that I and my stats were being productized at the same time.

So I left.

Just as using the site encouraged me to read more, leaving it took my interest in books with it. Whenever I took a book in my hand, I felt that I didn't want to record it, but I didn't want to leave it unrecorded either.

The solution🔗

I built my gaming backlog into this site last year, leaving Gremlin and Backloggery behind, and EyeSpace to replace Instagram. I realized that I could do the same with the list of books I have read.

I made a list of features I wanted and another list of the ones I didn't need. It was like this:

Features I wanted:

• List the books I've read.
• Yearly, based on the start date and end date (time is not important).
• Keep track of the author and the title, plus the original title if the book was a translated one.
• List similar-sized cover miniatures.
• Store quotes I record. This feature should support multiple languages. If an original English translation is not available, it should let me provide my own English translation along with the quote. In this case, it should mark that it is not a professional translation.
• Adding a new book should not take more time than 10 seconds.
• Adding a new quote should not take more time than typing the text itself.

Features I didn't want:

• A database that needs maintenance, backups, indexing, and resource usage optimization.
• Social features (other users, comments, likes, etc.).
• Statistics.
• Tracking editions, publishers, authors, editors, and so on.
• Having any other metadata about the books.

So I did it: Booklog

It might not count as self-hosting because I don't run a Bookwyrm instance or any other alternatives. But I wanted to have the strongest possible ownership over my data. Everything is stored as text (CSV and JSON formats), so I'm not bound to any tech, programming language generations, or database engine versions. Still, my whole site (including my whole blog, gaming backlog, and internal Instagram alternative) is generated in 1.28 seconds from scratch before publishing it.

Notes🔗

I read in English and Hungarian (and perhaps Finnish in the future, but I'm not there yet). I read the book in the language the title suggests.

The content of the quotes part is being filled gradually. I already looked for the original text of my favorite Carl Sagan quotes, but I still have many quotes from English authors in Hungarian. I plan to upload the original versions of them later.

I also plan to add custom explanatory translations to the Hungarian ones so you don't have to rely on some site translator plugin while browsing them.

The original version of this post is part of the Blaugust 2026 series on my blog along with:

• Memories Taken by the Heat
• Bombanana!
• Blaugust 2026