The update I know that you have been dying for: All of the books contained in my four-tiered shelf have been added into LibraryThing. This does not include the stacks on top of it, the stacks around it and the piles scattered throughout the apartment.

This certainly has been a good way to figure out what I have and what I don't. Why I kept some things and got rid of others is a mystery likely born of moving around and stashing my books places that I am not. The bookswaps I've had since moving to NYC have also contributed to my strange collection.

So far less than half of my books have been cataloged (no comics either), but I plan on continuing and weeding as I go. I hope to sell/swap the stuff I don't want anymore and buy more small press books.

Perhaps I am not facile with the software yet, but I am finding it very difficult to get good suggestions from LT. So, any suggestions besides scanning the lists of books that my friends put on Goodreads?

Let's stop talking about hair and maybe talk a little bit about homework. Not my homework, which is amorphous and mounting, but the homework that high school and college kids hope to finish by googling the title of a book and copy n pasting. This type of thing is one of the uggles one must put up with when putting writing on the internet, but still, when combing my stats, it still annoys me. Actually doing the reading is much more interesting, though I will admit that what qualifies as interesting for me may not correspond with the average teenager.

$$$


Tonight as I cycled home from school, using avenues with bike lanes, I had yet another confrontation with people who just can't bear to be on the sidewalks with all those other people. I believe this inability to view a biker's safety as a higher priority than walking faster than the sidewalk allows is a sort of egomania.

As I was tearing up Eight Avenue, after making my way through the laneless nightmare that is 40th-42nd Sts., I pulled over to the mushroom head emblazoned track and soon encountered a flock of douchebags, khakis pressed and ties flying, in a vee formation spread over my lane. I said to them, "Hey douchebags, nice walking in the bike lane." They waited for me to pass a ways and yelled a rousing, "Fuck you, dyke!"

Class incarnate, they were.

$$$

I got my first graded assignment of grad school back today, an analysis of LibraryThing's cataloging abilities.
I got an A.
Hooray!

cannibalizing the listserv

The original content portion of tryharder has been meager recently. This will likely continue until I get some reviewing and school obligations out of the way. Of course, whenever I make a statement like this I end up unaccountably belching out reviews...

^^^

Save the Words is a site for hopeless wordlovers and fans of the obscure and Samuel Johnson groupies. Use it well, my friends.

^^^
Diorama-rama!
The New York Times reports on books in the wild:
"It’s Only Natural, This Thing for Books"

If my books were free to exist in another habitat I think many of them would choose subway platforms and laundromats.

^^^

I wanted to catalog a collection of mine that could actually be finished during a sitcom, so I chose our cookbooks:

The books that are mine and both of ours are tagged in two collections, B's books are tagged in one collection. When I search my entire holdings, everything comes up. I think it works.

I've been inspired by a recent school assignment to put my library, even in its diminished state, onto LibraryThing for cataloging purposes. I'm not sure if I have to make it public; if I don't, I might just keep it to myself for awhile.

Does anybody use it for your own library? For your work's library? For your group's library? Let me know!

Edited to Add:
Damn, this is addicting. I've only done 35 books so far and I could stay up all night...