Tag Archives: LibraryThing

July Reading

books, reading,

I have been seeing lots of fun collages of book covers showing what people read during the month and decided I needed to make one for July. Not surprisingly, I headed to Canva where I found a plethora of reading tracker templates. They all made it easy to copy, paste and resize the book covers that I already had saved in my LibraryThing thread.

I like this but would like to include a little more data. One template included five stars that could be filled in. I also want to add a headphones icon to indicate audio books. I usually listen to one or two each month. I think I can make the book covers into links. And, I recognize that it is not at all accessible. I have listed the books below this post and linked to their pages on LibraryThing.

There’s always next month!

The image is a bookshelf with nine book covers:

The Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge

A Train to Moscow by Elena Gordokhova

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, vol 1 by Beth Brower

Talking As Fast As I Can by Lauren Graham

The Widows’ Guide to Murder by Amanda Ashby

Lilith by Nikki Marmery

Hidden in Smoke by Lee Goldberg

The Buffalo Creek Disaster by Gerald M. Stern

A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George

Happy Belated Thingaversary to Me!

books, reading

I knew my anniversary of joining LibraryThing was coming up, but I thought it was later this week. Turns is, my Thingaversary was last Friday. I joined the site on October 13, 2005! Eighteen years of recording my books and connecting with other book lovers and readers. One of my retirement goals was to be more connected: I check in more often and post on other people’s threads, and I write at least short reviews of every book I read, something I didn’t always take time to do before.

LT was an early vision of what the Web could be in terms of both utility and community. I am pleased to have been part of it almost since its inception in August 2005. It is old school and has stayed much the same, adding features and updates but not messing with its original design and purpose.

Cheers to LT and here’s to another 18 years!

Happy Birthday, LT!

books, reading

LibraryThing appeared on the World Wide Web on August 29, 2005. They are celebrating their 18th birthday with a fun scavenger hunt that encourages you to explore the site. If you are a reader and book lover, it’s worth creating an account to play!

My own 18th anniversary is coming soon. I joined the site on October 13, 2005. According to LT practice, I am permitted to buy one book for each year and one to grow on. I better get started on my wishlist. LT came around at just the right moment when I was considering how to catalog my rapidly growing book collection. I had been tinkering with an Access database but it meant entering the books manually. LT solved that with a web-based search along with the offer of community of readers. I have written about my involvement in LT in the past including my participation in their 75 Books a Year group.

In 2005, I only entered one book: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. I even wrote a short review. The next year I entered a few more and then began keeping my completed reading regularly in 2007. I have not yet catalogued my unread books but may devote some time this winter to working on it. LT sells a handy dandy scanner called the CueCat. They also offer a library management software program called TinyCat. It has a free version for individual users and low cost versions for small institutions.

I am grateful to creator Tim Spalding and the whole LT team for developing this readers’ retreat, demonstrating how to harness the Web for good.

Happy Birthday, LibraryThing!

Old School Tech

books, community, Libraries,

I use LibraryThing to track my reading and connect with a community of readers. I joined soon after it began in late 2005. The site has grown and changed with the times–including recently adding AI search–but at its base, it uses a wiki, built on MediaWiki software (think Wikipedia), for community collaboration. Groups use it to track members as well as communal reading. And, I was reminded recently by a friend, individual users are welcome to create pages.

Turns out I had done so in 2010…and, as with many of those experiments, I wrote some text as proof of concept and then never returned. I didn’t have a purpose in mind.

Today, however, I went back and considered ways I might incorporate those wiki pages into my reading life. I started by creating a page where I could track the various series I read. Like many avid readers, I have started a variety of series, mostly mysteries, but then lost track of them, perhaps losing interest in the character or just forgetting about them as time goes on. There are a few that I do keep up with, something that is a bit easier to do by following authors and getting alerts when new books are coming. I have an analog day book where I have listed the various series but, in an effort to downsize generally, I’m moving the list to the wiki. I track my books on LT, and they have pages for the series that show which ones you have read. I was able to copy and paste those lists into the wiki page for easy editing. It also helps that I know html and wiki syntax.

I have an affinity for wikis, I think, because I was there when they started and have grown up with them, hosting a few on my own server, playing with early ones like pbwiki and wikispaces, watching Wikipedia become an international collaborative community. They can seem clunky with their old school code, but I think the stripped down format helps us focus on the important part: creating and collaborating largely through text. Again, that may seem old-fashioned in a world of multimedia, but at its heart, multimedia is text-based. Someone writes those words that are spoken, and wikis allow us to grapple with how best to put them together to express our communal knowledge and ideas.

My Goal for 2023

books, reading

In conversation with a LibraryThing friend, I said my goal for 2023 was “less social media and more good books.” She said she needed to turn it into a poster, print it out and post it over her laptop.

I went ahead and created a quick graphic in Canva.

Happy Friday! LibraryThing members have been hosting an unofficial social distancing weekend readathon since April 2020. We informally sign on and then report our reading results including number of pages and hours along with other details such as non-reading activities and snacks. I participated last weekend and have signed on for this one as well. With the start of the new year and various new challenges, I have been pulling books from my shelf, checking them out from the library and buying them from Better World Books. Here are the stacks of books I want to read in the next few months:

I’ll end with a weird coincidence: Doomsday Book, in the right hand pile, is used and came from Better World Books. But, it is signed with the inscription: “To Karen, Gode health & long life! Connie Willis” I think I can hear the Twilight Zone music playing.

Happy reading!