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15 December 2005
Library Thing Is any one else losing time to cataloging books on this awesome site?
misteraitch-I found you through some mutual books (Arno Schmidt)
sciurus-You can import from Amazon or LOC under the add tab, or you can search other users and add when you see the book you have. It's only taken me a couple of hours to enter a couple hundred books like that.
I signed up right after they opened when they didn't have that kind of functionality [or if they did, there weren't enough users to make it useful]. The importing stuff doesn't help me a whole lot since lots of my books are used. Maybe I'll start working on it again though...
Orthogonality—no, I’m a ‘consultant’ (though in effect just a business-systems programmer) at a phone company, who just happens to own a few architecture-related books.
It means I tried to read it, but failed. Also generally means that I don't fault the book, and plan to try again sometime. Books I didn't like are on "not recommended".
John Crowley is the only one of my favorite authors that I've met (at a book signing). He was very cool.
This is a cool idea, but I don't know if I'll bother to do it. Maybe.
Now, if I could scan my books in with a handheld, portable scanner...
Little, Big is a great book. Well, what I've read is great. For some reason, I've tried to read it 3 times, but yet to finish the damn thing. Maybe it's time for number 4...
Little, Big is one of my desert island books; I've read it about 6 times and it just gets better each time. Hmmmmm. Maybe since I'm socked in today. . .
I love the idea of cataloguing my books but the execution, not so much. I'm with teece, I want a portable handheld scanner. I tried to do it one night with an old old apple laptop in a spreadsheet but I got bored after just two shelves. There are probably close to 2000 books in this house and only 3 of them (the dictionary, PSP 9 for dummies and basic HTML) are within easy typing distance of the computer.
The Avram Davidson Treasury has been my curl-up-and-read book this winter. Yummm.
My first encounter with Davidson was picking up some cheesy-looking 70s mass-markets at a used bookstore and being shocked to find them orders of magnitude better than expected. He really was special.
I keep thinking I'm going to read more by Crowley (read Aegypt in college and it went right over my head -- worth another go, I think) but haven't yet.
Re-reading Helprin's Winter's Tale right now (one of my favorite books, and one that is perfect for this weather). I seem to remember that Helprin claimed that LITTLE, BIG was an inspiration for him for his book.
Not to turn this into a Crowley thread, but did anyone read his novella The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines? I'd never even heard of it until now (when I was Amazonning his name and planning my attack on his books).
yes but apparently you had already found it. I also like John Crowley. I'm just trying to decide if I want to spring for the $25 membership since I already have a booklist of my own [which made importing my books simple]. I like John Crowley a lot but I started with Little Big and none of his other books stuck with me in quite the same way.
I'd do this if I had a barcode scanner. Of course, the good ones don't have barcodes; though I suppose they've been assigned ISBNs retroactively. I might have a hard time finding out which edition my copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra is, since it's in German. OLD German. That's how cool I am.
I just opened one of my boxes of books (still need to build that bookshelf) and it had 26 books in it. I've got 15 such boxes, so I'm guesstimating I have about 375 books. That's probably low. Also, it doesn't count comic books, because then it would be like three times that. What about graphic novels?
That figure still feels really low. Less than four hundred? Ok, this week I'm going to do the bookshelf thing and count them. If it kills me.
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