A “To be read” list
Monday, 08 January, 2007
It is the last day of my holidays, Ben has gone to work and I am pottering around the house. One of the things I love about holidays is pottering around the house, and when I potter, I always get fantastic urges to embark on projects that would take lots and lots of time. LibraryThing, for example, is something I'm finding rather hard to resist (and not even the mountains of books that I own daunt me! Oh, for a lifetime subscription ...)
But since I only had two and a half weeks of leave and since there's a lot of other stuff I wanted to be doing, I mollified my book obsession somewhat by combing through my library for things I wanted to get rid of and signing up with BookMooch.
Tim R first introduced me to BookMooch. Apparently it plugs into LibraryThing quite well. The concept is quite simple and wonderful: you list all the books you want to get rid of and you get given points based on the number of books you list. Then you use these points to mooch books of other people—books that you actually want. So I put in 23 books (which gave me 2.3 points) and then I found someone in Singapore who wants to get rid of Fifteen by Beverly Cleary. I mooched it off him (which took 2 points off me which were given to him) and, if he's willing, he'll ship it to me bearing the postage cost himself. I think you also get points if you leave feedback and ratings for the people you mooch from. Someone in the UK mooched Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb off me, giving me 3 points that I can spend mooching off other people. So it's a win-win situation: I get rid of my old books to other people who actually want them, and I get books I actually want from people who want to get rid of them.
I keep saying to myself that I should be reading more. (Though, according to my Current blog, last year I read 32 books [not including graphic novels and comics] which is almost as many as the year before. And 13 of the 32 were non-fiction.) I don't get given that many books and I buy even less than that (though I do tend to borrow every so often), plus I tend to forget what I have on my bookshelves that I haven't read. I wondered if there was some way to keep encouraging myself to read but not just read—read widely.
So the other day I was scouring the internet, trying to see if someone had come up with something cool in the same vein as BookMooch and LibraryThing but for reading lists. Wouldn't it be great if you could make lists of all the books you'd like to read, then categorise them so that they would display as “Books I own”, “Books I don't own”. Wouldn't it be cool if they could be categorised into genres (fantasy, realist, biography) and then into other categories such as “easy read”, “more of a challenge” and “really need to use your brain”. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it could work out what books would be good to read in tandem (because often you need a light read to balance a heavy one) using keywords and descriptions from the Library of Congress (so that maybe it would suggest that you pair Carson's The Gagging of God with Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller ...). Wouldn't it be great if it could suggest random books on your lists to you every now and then when you run out of things to read (not that I ever do but anyway...) Wouldn't it be fantastic if it had the function where your friends could suggest books that you ought to read but also add their comments on why you ought to read it (because let's face it, life's too short for all the millions of books in the world: convince me why I should read A Game of Thrones [by the way, Haoran, I'm halfway through it; only took a year for me to actually begin! Sorry I've had it for so long]).
In the hour that I spent Googling such a service, I came up with nothing. If someone has the means and opportunity to make my idea a reality, feel free to nab it and let me know so I can sign up.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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Wow Karen - book mooch sounds awesome!!! If I could ever reconcile myself to getting rid of any of my books, I’d give it a go!
But seeing as I just mooched a bookshelf so I now have room for all my books, it’s looking less likely… Well, keep letting us know how it’s going anyway, you might convince me!
Which reminds me, Barneys is going to have a book/fair in our old carpark in late Feb, so you can come and grab some more reading matter
Haven’t had thorough look at all, but Shelfari?
Looks interesting ... Not sure what it would give me that LibraryThing wouldn’t (apart from it being free).