Library Thing

ChaskingMoksha mentioned a new site she'd found, Library Thing, so I checked it out. Two hours later, I realized that this could be as addictive as IMDB. It's not a great idea for me to get distracted right this minute from work, but hey. Sign up (easy-peasy) and you can catalogue your books! This may not seem terribly interesting on the face of it, but it turns out to be much more than making a list: the interface is really easy to use. Go to your bookshelf, start typing in the names, and it will pull up all the information about the book from Amazon, or the Library of Congress, or other sources. You just click to confirm the correct information, and the book is added to your library. Your library can be displayed either in list form or as a "bookshelf" with pictures of the covers. The real fun comes because the list also shows you which other members have read or tagged your books; you can get recommendations, read reviews, and more. Check out the page called "zeitgeist" to see how many ways you can connect. You get to do 200 books for free, then there are some fees, but it's not expensive. Since 200 books hardly makes a dent in my library at home, let alone what I have at the office, I started with the books I have in my bedroom: these are usually the ones I haven't read yet, or want to reread. I'll definitely be exploring this over the next few months.

I have always been a book hoarder, but because I've moved so often, there have been times when I've made the decision to sell or give away a lot of books. Sometimes I wish I still had the hundreds of paperback science fiction books I'd bought for a nickel apiece with my allowance when I was in Junior High in bookstores like The Green Apple in San Francisco--they had such great, lurid covers. But there were just too many moves, and as a poor student often sharing a bedroom, I had almost no room for them. I got tired of sleeping with all my books. So some of them had to go.

When I moved to Minnesota, all I brought were my clothes, my computer, my pots and pans and 35 boxes of books. I swore I would never sleep with my books again; they could live in another room of the house or in my office. But about four years ago, I gave away almost ALL of my books in French. They had been acquired lovingly, one by one, in the used bookstores of Paris and Berkeley, and mailed across the country when I moved away from California. There they sat, taking up a wall of bookshelf space in my office for years while I pursued other interests. Finally, I realized that my new books were piling up on the floor, and that these books hadn't been touched in years. If I wanted to reread Proust, I could go to the library and get an edition with bigger print. So, I chose a few that I couldn't part with, and then I lugged boxes of memories up two flights of stairs to the French department, and left them on a bench in the hall with a sign that said "take me!" Even as I was leaving the boxes, colleagues were beginning to hover. They all claimed they too many books as well, but the lure was more than they could resist. In three days, all the books had found a new home. The shelves in my office weren't empty for long.