Sunday, August 09, 2009

Ways of organizing books

I realized recently that I haven't been very good about writing in a tiny brown leather notebook where I keep a list of all the books I've read. In fact, my last entry in the little notebook appears to be September 2007. Gulp! I've read lots of books since then. Now I'm going back and reconstructing my reading history so I can make accurate entries in the little notebook.
Thankfully, I have several other ways of organizing my reading habits to which I can refer.
There's this blog, for one! I don't notate everything I read here, but I do quite a bit, and certainly the high points and most of the fiction. One of the things I enjoy about this blog, after keeping in touch with my old friends, is perusing the books I've read over the years through the archived entries.
Next is my catalog on LibraryThing. I started with LibraryThing back in 2005, and though other online reading sites have entered the fray since then, I still like LibraryThing the best, mostly because of its robust cataloging function. GoodReads is more oriented toward sharing books, but I found its interface a little too cumbersome to be worth switching. This is the benefit to LibraryThing's first entry: For me to switch from LibraryThing, a new service would have to offer a substantially better service. A merely somewhat better service would not be able to overcome my inertia toward changing services.
I also have kind of mixed feelings about these online services for sharing books and thoughts on books. I don't really need new ideas for books to read. I have long, long, long lists of books I want to read but probably won't ever get to, so I don't need to actively search for new ones. And I go back and forth on making my LibraryThing catalog public. Right now, it's private. I can never decide on whether I want the outside world to view my library or not. Sometimes I think it's harmless. Other times I feel like a personal library is a highly, well, personal thing, and I'm not so anxious to share. This is one area where LibraryThing could improve: Making a catalog visible to friends but not the general public. Maybe you can even do that already, but I have not yet discovered how.
Finally, I keep a spreadsheet of every book I've read with my book group. It includes the book title, author, and which member of our group picked it. Yes, I am this organized! (Read: Obsessive-compulsive)
So with these tools I am now updating the little notebook, aka the analog database.

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