Got myself a new bookshelf
by Map on September 10th, 2008 (Permalink)
Here.
I hate twitter. I hate the idea of twitter. I don’t want to read about how some friend of mine just returned from his/her trip to bathroom and how it all went. And most of us aren’t visited by great ideas worth to be shared with the rest of mankind every 30 minutes. I know I am not. The only thing I am interested to know every 30 minutes is what my friends are reading, what page they are on and what they think about the book at this very moment. 
GoodReads’ online book warehouse got it pretty close to what my dream book warehouse looks like. It comes with pre-installed “read”, “currently reading” and “to read” shelves, which is how I naturally sort my books. It allows you to rate your books and to post quick comments, and here they got it right again. To write a full-blown book review is time-consuming and I often lack will power to finish mine, or even to start them. A bookshelf so inviting to “quick-and-dirty” style of book reviews instantly won me over. Sometimes the book is so uninspiring, so all I want to do is to give it 1 star and to add “I wonder why it is even written”. Sometimes I want to keep a few quotes in hope that some day I will add some profound comments to them.
Thomas Paul apparently types away a couple of pages for every book he reads, but who else can do it? For the rest of us there is GoodReads.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:15 am
Interesting. I spent several days a few months ago feverishly scanning information about my book collection into LibraryThing.
The rest of life called a halt to that exercise for a while (I still have 1000 or so books still to enter) but I do like the way that LibraryThing uses everyone’s data to connect people and books together in useful ways.
You have reminded me that I should really also enter some of my reviews there too.
September 13th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
I agree with you about Twitter. It seem to me to be a bigger exercise in narcissism that even blogging. Anyone who cares that much about what I am doing at every moment is either a stalker or is planning to rob my house.
I got started writing book reviews on Amazon and I enjoyed doing it. I like being able to go back and read my reviews to remind myself what I thought of a book I read. Plus, writing all those reviews gave me the added bonus of becoming a Vine Voice on Amazon which means I get free stuff every month including lots of books. And I should add that most of my reviews are only 3 or 4 paragraphs.
I love reading the NY Times book review section every Sunday. What I like about the NY Times is that the reviews are all very long. They give you lots of information about the book. Since I can only read about 20 books every year, being able to read reviews of 20 books every week makes me feel like I am reading a lot more than I am.
I subscribed to a book review magazine but I didn’t renew because the reviews were so short I didn’t feel like I got the flavor of the books.