So since I got started on Librarything, I have been more obsessed with books than ever. I'm not sure if that is really a good thing. (Does anyone ever really NEED to be more obsessed with books that I have been for as long as I can remember? Probably not.) Either way, I'm enjoying it. It's keeping me reading, but I feel compelled to write about the things that I read (at least a brief review) and keep track of them in my posting for that purpose, so it's keeping me on track with those habits that I was trying to solidify.
That being said, writing those reviews is not really the same as what I do when I blog about books, since the things that I post on the site are seen by users outside the context of "me." Therefore, the things that I post don't always touch on the ways that the things that I am reading hit me personally or connect with the little goings on in my head and my life, or how I ended up with that particular book in my hand or anything like that. I like the reviewing, and I hope that the things I contribute help people out, but it's not the same. I want to do both maybe, both to synthesize my thoughts into something useful for the general non-Maggie knowing reader in terms of a well-thought out opinion of a book and how good or bad it is, and to take the time to organize my thoughts for the Maggie-knowing reader, or perhaps more importantly, for the Maggie herself to better know what I was thinking when I read something, and how it plays out with the other things in my life. I think doing both is important, and I am not sure that I know how to find time for both, but what are you going to do?
Anyway, I guess that I am going to post my reviews here as well, for the three people that might occasionally read this thing, and when a book touches me, or I have thoughts that just don't fit with a review, I'll put them in after the review. We'll see how that works for now. Cool.
Showing posts with label LibraryThing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LibraryThing. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Library Thing
So joining LibraryThing.com has got me thinking. I am sort of in love with the site, and with reading the posts and thoughts of people who seem to be readers of the same obsessive sort that I am. Still, I have to ask myself how I want to use all the tools that they have there.
First of all, do I want my LibraryThing account to reflect books that I have read, or instead, the physical collection of books that I own? Sure, there is considerable overlap between the two, but there are also a tremendous number of books that I have read and do not own, books that I own but have not read yet. Since it would be fundamentally impossible to remember and list all the books that I have ever read (and I think not a useful exercise), I have decided, at least for now, that I want the list to reflect the books that I actually have in my possession as opposed to any sort of exhaustive reading list.
But this made me think about what it means to have a collection of books, as opposed to just having books. I own many many books, and I suppose, when I really think about it, I do consider myself a collector. But I realized that there are many books that I truly love that I do not have a copy of in my possession at the moment, either because I didn't bring them with me on some move, or because I lent them out and never saw them again, or because I read copies borrowed from the library or a friend and never got my own. Now, it doesn't make sense to me, as a collector, to have so many books that I haven't read (or even that I have read but don't really adore) when I don't have some that I really love. And the idea of logging all these books into my LibraryThing account and rating them and writing reviews, and not owning some that really matter to me, I find that distressing.
So, I'm going to try to think about this more, or at least, be more deliberate about choosing the books that I buy (as something distinct from the books that I read). For books that I just want to read, I have to remember that I have a wonderful library right around the corner from me, and I can get them there and save myself some money and space, if I am not sure that I will ever want to read a book again. Then I can focus on owning books that I love, or books from authors that I love, and having a collection that reflects my tastes and my personality more than the random whims that take me to the bookstore. I just need to keep track of all those books that I see and think "Oh! I want to read that!" and not allow that impulse to cause me to put out money. I need to learn how to separate wanting to read a book and wanting to own a book as distinct impulses. It might take some thinking, but I think that using LibraryThing in an act of cataloging might help me to do that.
So with deciding that I want to use it as a catalog for my collection, comes the question of choosing to pay for it. It's free to join, to use the message boards and communicate with other readers, and to list up to 200 books in your library. I have WELL over 200 books in my library, so I have to choose between having an incomplete catalog and paying a fee. ($10 a year or $25 for lifetime membership.) It seems to me that would be money well spent, but given my tendency towards fits of enthusiasm followed by an utter lack of attention, I think that I will spend a few weeks trying to get into a pattern of use, and answering the questions that the use brings up for me, before I put down the money for something and then just ignore it completely.
I’ve also got to ask myself questions about rating and commenting and reviewing, and how I want to go about blogging what I read and thinking about books that I really do want to own, but I have to let it be a process, or I’ll burn out too soon.
And with that, I’m going to stop writing for now.
First of all, do I want my LibraryThing account to reflect books that I have read, or instead, the physical collection of books that I own? Sure, there is considerable overlap between the two, but there are also a tremendous number of books that I have read and do not own, books that I own but have not read yet. Since it would be fundamentally impossible to remember and list all the books that I have ever read (and I think not a useful exercise), I have decided, at least for now, that I want the list to reflect the books that I actually have in my possession as opposed to any sort of exhaustive reading list.
But this made me think about what it means to have a collection of books, as opposed to just having books. I own many many books, and I suppose, when I really think about it, I do consider myself a collector. But I realized that there are many books that I truly love that I do not have a copy of in my possession at the moment, either because I didn't bring them with me on some move, or because I lent them out and never saw them again, or because I read copies borrowed from the library or a friend and never got my own. Now, it doesn't make sense to me, as a collector, to have so many books that I haven't read (or even that I have read but don't really adore) when I don't have some that I really love. And the idea of logging all these books into my LibraryThing account and rating them and writing reviews, and not owning some that really matter to me, I find that distressing.
So, I'm going to try to think about this more, or at least, be more deliberate about choosing the books that I buy (as something distinct from the books that I read). For books that I just want to read, I have to remember that I have a wonderful library right around the corner from me, and I can get them there and save myself some money and space, if I am not sure that I will ever want to read a book again. Then I can focus on owning books that I love, or books from authors that I love, and having a collection that reflects my tastes and my personality more than the random whims that take me to the bookstore. I just need to keep track of all those books that I see and think "Oh! I want to read that!" and not allow that impulse to cause me to put out money. I need to learn how to separate wanting to read a book and wanting to own a book as distinct impulses. It might take some thinking, but I think that using LibraryThing in an act of cataloging might help me to do that.
So with deciding that I want to use it as a catalog for my collection, comes the question of choosing to pay for it. It's free to join, to use the message boards and communicate with other readers, and to list up to 200 books in your library. I have WELL over 200 books in my library, so I have to choose between having an incomplete catalog and paying a fee. ($10 a year or $25 for lifetime membership.) It seems to me that would be money well spent, but given my tendency towards fits of enthusiasm followed by an utter lack of attention, I think that I will spend a few weeks trying to get into a pattern of use, and answering the questions that the use brings up for me, before I put down the money for something and then just ignore it completely.
I’ve also got to ask myself questions about rating and commenting and reviewing, and how I want to go about blogging what I read and thinking about books that I really do want to own, but I have to let it be a process, or I’ll burn out too soon.
And with that, I’m going to stop writing for now.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Back to Blogging: Booklist and New Tool
OK, so I live in Cincinnati now, and I have been thinking that I wanted to get back to blogging (since summer is PRIME TIME for basking in the sunshine and reading my afternoons away) but "the road outside my house, is paved with good intentions" as it were.
Anyway, today I was sitting at my desk in my new lab, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work related reading that I have to do, so I decided to take a break and find something else to read.
So I went to the blogger website. In blogs of note for the month, they have listed Women in Science, which seemed interesting... since I suppose I am one. From there, I checked out Neurosciencegirl... since I suppose I am one of those too. There I found the list below, which I thought was interesting.
This is the list of the 100 or so books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users. You're supposed to bold the books you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish. Interestingly, blogger doesn't seem to have an underline feature, I assume because that implies that something is a link, so I'm just bolding what I've read, no matter what the reason. I'm also putting a (*) next to the ones that I own but haven't read, (**) for books that are in my digital book's library but not yet read. Here's my list:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina**
Crime and Punishment**
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick**
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities**
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace**
Vanity Fair**
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex*
Quicksilver*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch**
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo**
Dracula**
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist**
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners**
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame**
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield**
So a couple of things I think are slightly interesting: There are 102 books on this list, and I have read only 36 of them, (which doesn't seem like so very many). I traced the list back as many blogs as I could (turned out to be four) and 36 seems better than average. Also, I seem to be a lot less likely to start but not finish.
Of course, the other intriguing thing about this is : "Where does this list come from again? What exactly is Library Thing?" And it turns out that LibraryThing.com is a very cool little website where you can create a personal profile with all the books in your own library, rate and review them, and then connect with people that have similar taste in books or get recommendations for things to read. So I joined up, and while my library is not even sort of started yet, here it is.
So that makes this list make a little more sense to me, because it didn't seem like a real "Top 100" by any criteria I can think of, but it totally makes sense to me as the "100 books that people that really love books are most likely to have bought, be willing to admit that they own, but not gotten around to actually reading." If that's the criteria, then a list that combines classics (cult and literary) with a bunch of fairly recent popular fiction and some interesting but general non-fiction makes perfect sense. A list of books that would lead readers to think, "I really should read that..."
And by that standard, I am a pretty boring, normal reader. Because there are only about three books here that I have not at least picked up and considered at one point or another... such is life.
Anyway, I'll get internet access back on Monday, and then spend a couple of days playing with my LibraryThing bookshelf, and writing some reviews and figuring out what standards I am going to rate books by, and hopefully using this all as a reason to get back to blogging. We'll see how that goes.
Anyway, today I was sitting at my desk in my new lab, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work related reading that I have to do, so I decided to take a break and find something else to read.
So I went to the blogger website. In blogs of note for the month, they have listed Women in Science, which seemed interesting... since I suppose I am one. From there, I checked out Neurosciencegirl... since I suppose I am one of those too. There I found the list below, which I thought was interesting.
This is the list of the 100 or so books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users. You're supposed to bold the books you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish. Interestingly, blogger doesn't seem to have an underline feature, I assume because that implies that something is a link, so I'm just bolding what I've read, no matter what the reason. I'm also putting a (*) next to the ones that I own but haven't read, (**) for books that are in my digital book's library but not yet read. Here's my list:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina**
Crime and Punishment**
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick**
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities**
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace**
Vanity Fair**
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex*
Quicksilver*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch**
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo**
Dracula**
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist**
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners**
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame**
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield**
So a couple of things I think are slightly interesting: There are 102 books on this list, and I have read only 36 of them, (which doesn't seem like so very many). I traced the list back as many blogs as I could (turned out to be four) and 36 seems better than average. Also, I seem to be a lot less likely to start but not finish.
Of course, the other intriguing thing about this is : "Where does this list come from again? What exactly is Library Thing?" And it turns out that LibraryThing.com is a very cool little website where you can create a personal profile with all the books in your own library, rate and review them, and then connect with people that have similar taste in books or get recommendations for things to read. So I joined up, and while my library is not even sort of started yet, here it is.
So that makes this list make a little more sense to me, because it didn't seem like a real "Top 100" by any criteria I can think of, but it totally makes sense to me as the "100 books that people that really love books are most likely to have bought, be willing to admit that they own, but not gotten around to actually reading." If that's the criteria, then a list that combines classics (cult and literary) with a bunch of fairly recent popular fiction and some interesting but general non-fiction makes perfect sense. A list of books that would lead readers to think, "I really should read that..."
And by that standard, I am a pretty boring, normal reader. Because there are only about three books here that I have not at least picked up and considered at one point or another... such is life.
Anyway, I'll get internet access back on Monday, and then spend a couple of days playing with my LibraryThing bookshelf, and writing some reviews and figuring out what standards I am going to rate books by, and hopefully using this all as a reason to get back to blogging. We'll see how that goes.
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