I Tracked a Year of Friend Book Recommendations in a Spreadsheet. It Told Me Things I Wasn't Ready For.

Last January, on a whim that I fully intended to abandon by February, I started a spreadsheet. Every time a friend recommended a book to me, I logged it: their name, the title, the date, the 'pitch intensity' (rated 1–5 based on how hard they pushed), and — crucially — whether I actually read it.

I thought I was making a reading tracker. What I actually made was a map of my friendships. And when I zoomed out at the end of the year, the patterns hit me harder than any of the books did.

What the Data Showed

Forty-seven recommendations from nineteen people. Of those, I finished twenty-eight. Here's what the columns revealed:

My friend Marcus had a 100% hit rate. Six recommendations, six reads, six books I loved. Marcus doesn't recommend often, and when he does, he's clearly been sitting on it. I now treat a Marcus rec like a stock tip from an insider.

My friend Priya and I are drifting, and the spreadsheet knew before I did. She recommended four books. I read zero. Not because her taste got worse — because our lives got busier, and the recs had become a way of reaching out rather than a genuine match. Her January rec was a novel about motherhood and burnout, sent two weeks after she went back to work from parental leave. I didn't read it. I also didn't call her enough. The spreadsheet caught what I'd been avoiding.

The five-star pushes were the biggest flops. Books pitched at intensity 5 ('you HAVE to read this, it WILL change your life') had a 40% finish rate. Books pitched at a casual 2 ('eh, this was fun, you might like it')? 85%. Enthusiasm, it turns out, is a terrible predictor of compatibility.

The Framework: Build Your Own Rec Map

If you want to try this — and you should, it's cheaper than therapy and only slightly more emotionally risky — here's the system:

1. Columns you need: Friend, Title, Date, Pitch Intensity (1–5), Did I Read It? (Y/N), Did I Love It? (1–5), and a free-text 'What It Says About Us' column. Yes, that last column will get weird.
2. Log everything for a year, including recs you have no intention of following. The non-reads are the data.
3. Do a quarterly check-in. Look for friends with high rec counts and low read rates. That gap is a conversation waiting to happen — about the books, sure, but really about the friendship.
4. Identify your 'blind trust' person. Everyone has one friend whose taste operates as a proxy for their own. Knowing who that is tells you something about what you value.
5. Close the loop. Every book you finish, report back. The thank-you text is half the friendship economy.

The Part That Wrecked Me (In a Good Way)

Here's what I didn't expect: the spreadsheet made me a better friend. Once I could see the pattern, I started treating recommendations as invitations instead of suggestions. When Priya sent her fifth rec, I read it in a weekend and called her Sunday night. We talked for two hours, and maybe forty minutes of it was about the book.

The other eighty minutes was everything the book had been standing in for.

A recommendation, it turns out, is rarely about the book. It's a friend saying I saw this and thought of the person you are. The spreadsheet just gave me a way to finally count how often the people in my life were thinking of me — and how often I'd been forgetting to think back.

So yes, open Excel. Make the columns. Track the data. But know going in: you're not really measuring books. You're measuring who knows you, who's trying to, and who you owe a phone call.