I have a site I made to track the books I read. It's pretty much entirely optimized for my own usage, but I've taken the opposite approach. The main view is a table with sortable columns/searching. At least given the amount I read (> 100 books/year) anything less dense is not very useful.

I do have a "feed" type view that shows a subset of the books with pictures, but it's more for visualization rather than actually being able to find anything.