Creek Running North

What a great idea! I’m also going to get started right away. I mean, after New Year’s festivities.

I guess The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life is in the other five sixths.

Speaking of books, I’m nearing the end of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Nice Christmas present, and heart-warming to a nice atheist boy like me. I would even recommend it to thoughtful theists and deists.

Oh shit, I should not have seen this.  Fine then, I just won’t meet any deadlines this year.  At. All.  I’ll just spend the whole fucking year cataloguing my books.  Thanks a lot, bub.

I refuse to be sucked into this meme.  It is almost as bad as the new Dr. Pepper commercial that seems to be showing on every airport and lounge between here, Sac, and SanFran.  “I want it now, i want it all” good gawd, what a vicious ugly human expression that is.  And now one gets to “show” how cool they are by having an online, public access demonstration of their personal libraries.  I can’t imagine how happy the retail outlets that sell barcode readers will be.

I can’t imagine how happy the retail outlets that sell barcode readers will be.

Well, OK, but it’s not necessarily about showing how cool you are. I’m always curious about what other people read, and, if you’re a lazy sod like me who likes the idea of browsing bookstores for hours but couldn’t be arsed, it’s also a great way of seeing books you might want to read but hadn’t heard of. Especially if the exhibitor’s tastes seem to overlap with your own. On the other hand, I’d be reluctant to exhibit my own collection, because people would probably laugh.

But Rob, the Major Matt Mason Big Little Book is a collectible now!

Barcode readers are easy to find for free, or for a very limited cost. LibraryThing sells ‘em for 15 bucks, postage included, and I’m sure you could get one for a couple bucks on Craigslist.

There are four reasons I think LibraryThing is a useful site:

1) It allows me to catalog my own library, said catalog being for my own use, with a minimum of effort. I’ve got enough books and a bad enough memory that I often spend twenty minutes looking for a book I know I have only to remember at last that I’ve given it away or sold it.

2) It allows me to find books recommended by people with similar interests and expertise. (Kinda like MySpace for people who can read.)

3) LibraryThing links to a number of book-swapping sites: stuff I have and no longer want can get swapped for stuff I’ve always wanted to read.

4) That Amazon link thing in the sidebar is the first kind of advertising I’ve found that I feel is completely consistent with the purpose of this site. Books of which I have thought well enough that I own them, content filtered by me. And in the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at whether this blog can at least pay for itself and judging its future accordingly.

But you know, far be it from me to object to someone proclaiming their greater ideological purity at my expense. We all know how driven I am to trumpet my own coolness.

We all know how driven I am to trumpet my own coolness.  More .... about me me me

Exactly.  Bitter satire is a necessary escalation of “force” when you have already started off a thread like this.  I personally don’t have feelings about this one way or the other in terms of the public’s perception of you via your library.  I just needed to get a petty dig in about you being so much a part of the Me Generation.  Pepsi or Coke??

I use Bookends to store the information about my library, and to access other materials from online.  It works well on Mac, and when i finally got most of my stuff put in, i felt some sense of accomplishment:  “Wow, i read all that shit??” It turns out that right now it is really useful in identifying huge chunks of my bookmarked URL’s and other references for a new website.

I librarything-ed 2,500 books without a barcode reader.  It’s not that hard, although it’s a bit harder for books without an ISBN.

Since it’s frickin’ Tuesday morning at work although it feels like Monday morning at work, and we’ve started 2007 with Bush. et al. wanting to send in more troops, and I have been forced to feel pretty sorry for a guy as bad as Saddam Hussein, and I just finished your “Timeline” piece, and my stomach’s a little bit gurgly.  Because of all this and more, I begrudgingly like this LibraryThing, but I will grumble that the books should be arranged in alphabetical order by author, not only by book title.  And if it’s already arranged that way somewhere on the site, and I was just too dumb to find it, my grump will settle in like an old toad.  (but please tell me anyway, somebody)

blondie, if you click on “tags” on the upper right side, and then click on “author cloud” (?), you will get an alphabetical list of authors, each of which you can click on to see their books.

Happy New Year to you, and your toad!

How’m I supposed to maintain my crabbiness with people being nice left and right?  Thanks, Rob G.  Happy New Year to you 2!

Speaking of readings and me; one of the reasons i was more than my usual post celebratory grumpy yesterday was that i read Donavan Hohn’s MOBY DUCK: Or the Synthetic Wildnerness of Childhood folio piece in the January 2007 Harper’s Magazine on the plane home yesterday.  It is really one of the most colorfully depressing environmental indictments i have read in a long time.  If you have the chance to read it, get angry, change your choices of containers, and do more to stop the killing of the oceans, please do so, asap.

Hey!  Welcome back!

(I’ll see you over at LibraryThing!)

I may have to do the “books in the sidebar” thing on my site.  Damnit.