It's amazing how many semi-constructive ways there are to kill time on the internet. Between tagging my photos on flickr, Facebook, writing this blog and clicking 'random article' on Wikipedia, I've discovered LibraryThing, which allows you to catalogue your books online. It makes it very easy to catalogue books: you can search for them in different libraries including the Library of Congress, or on the various Amazons (.com, .co.uk, .de, etc); you can even edit your catalogue so it displays the correct covers for your books. It's also got a social aspect - like MySpace for readers - where you can comment on other people's collections, chat, or see whose collections overlap with your own.
I've only catalogued 80-odd books so far - partly by memory at work, partly from taking random books off the shelf today - but oddly, in the list of people who have the same books as me I've spotted two people I think I know. It's a small world...
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swords and dreams
All books are either dreams or swords/You can cut, or you can drug, with words - Amy Lowell
Me and mine on the internet
Currently reading
- A century of women: the history of women in Britain and the United States in the twentieth century - Sheila Rowbotham
- A history of 20th century fashion - Elizabeth Ewing
- Au bonheur des dames - Émile Zola
- La Princesse de Clèves - Madame de la Fayette
- The aesthetics of resistance - Peter Weiss
- The secret agent - Joseph Conrad
- The women's room - Marilyn French
Already read this year - 2009
- 1 - The foundling - Georgette Heyer
- 2 - Philby: the spy who betrayed a generation - Knightley, Page and Leitch
- 3 - Fathers and sons - Ivan Turgenev
- 4 - Tarabas - Joseph Roth
- 5 - The virgin in the garden - A.S. Byatt
- 6 - Streetfighting years - Tariq Ali
- 7 - Shadows of the pomegranate tree - Tariq Ali
- 8 - Women and children first - Cadogan and Craig
- 9 - The tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Brontë
- 10 - Jo Shapcott: her book - Jo Shapcott
- 11 - The book of blood - Vicki Feaver
- 12 - The Thursday kidnapping - Antonia Forest
- 13 - The thuggery affair - Antonia Forest
- 14 - We are now beginning our descent - James Meek
- 15 - The myth of Mars and Venus - Deborah Cameron
- 16 - Still Life - A.S. Byatt
- 17 - L'argent - Émile Zola
- 18 - Russia's path from Gorbachev to Putin - David Kotz
- 19 - Hardcore from the heart - Annie Sprinkle
- 20 - See we have coming to Dover! - Daljit Nagra
The rest of the internet
- Abebooks
- Ben Goldacre's Bad science
- Bibliophil
- Cabbages and Pumpkins
- Camberwell online - blog
- Daniel Barenboim
- Derelict London
- Doonesbury
- Doris Lessing
- Edward Said archive
- Found magazine
- Girl in the green dress
- Good reads
- Guernica magazine
- Gutenberg project
- Jewish Music Institute
- Last.fm
- Leonard Cohen
- Library thing
- London's Royal parks
- Marxists internet archive
- Mslexia magazine
- New Left Review
- Poetry Archive
- Poetry at plagiarist.com
- Poetry Foundation
- Poets.org
- Post Secret - blog
- Poésie française
- So many books
- Stephen Jay Gould archive
- Susan Sontag
- Tariq Ali
- The Camelot project
- Things magazine
- Think denk blog
- Tools are refundable
- Waylaid poetry blog
- Women writers - a zine
- Workspaces - blog
- Znet
5 comments:
If you're really bored you can look at mine (under my GU username) and compare, although I've bought about 200 books since I entered them.
Blimey, cataloguing over 2000 books is good going. We have 19 shared books, although I've only catalogued a hundred so far.
I'm thinking of borrowing a barcode scanner from work and adding my books that way: quicker than typing in ISBNs.
I clicked on your username - your cycle trip looks fun. How long do you think it will take you?
ooh, that shouldn't be viewable yet, I haven't announced it...need to sort out who I'll be raising money for, and work out how the blog works. It should take two weeks, I'm doing it in 3 weeks time. I'm not fit enough, but then it wouldn't be much of a challenge if I were.
20% overlap so far is actually pretty good. I did them all in a few days when I was bored (and probably unemployed) Haven't maintained it though. It's quite useful, as with last.fm, for tracing writers similar to the ones you know, but I got bored of it quite quickly. We should have a good overlap, although depends how many French and German classics you have in English or in original languages.
I think it ignores what language it's in; my copy of Barthes' Mythologies is in French and it's listing it as one of our shared books, and again for Radetzkymarsch and Les liaisons dangereuses.
I have Les Liaisons Dangereuses in French too, one of only about 3 books in foreign languages (Zazie dans le Metro is another). Cursed monoglot, but I do have about 600 in translation.
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