I’ve been trying to come up with a good encompassing title for my Friday collected-memes post. For now, I think I’m going with “Friday Q&A,” since most of them do involve answering questions. There’s a new one in the mix this week, too.
Tuesday Thingers: Why LT?
Tuesday Thingers is a new meme especially for LibraryThing users, recently launched by The Boston Bibliophile.
This week’s Tuesday Thingers question is: Why LT?
Why did you choose to open and maintain an LT account? Do you/did you use other online cataloging/social networking sites, like GoodReads or Shelfari? Do you use more than one? Are they different or do they serve different purposes?
The majority of the books on my shelves are books I haven’t read yet. These days, I give away most books after I read them, but I like having a record. In any case, I decided late last year that I really had to get a handle on the books that are taking over my house – how many I had, and what they were (had I messed up and bought duplicates because I’d forgotten one?). I had a shelf on BookCrossing (still do), but it wasn’t really ideal for cataloging purposes, so I looked at the newer sites. I joined GoodReads when I got an invite from an online friend, but once I got my book list together (ISBNs on spreadsheets) I took a look at LibraryThing too (based on the recommendations of other online friends), and decided to set up an account there as well. Cataloging my books online was my chief project during the holidays.
LibraryThing quickly became my primary online book-recording site; it’s just so easy! I’ve gotten really good about promptly recording new books in my library there, but I do need to spend time there more regularly updating my tags and posting links to my reviews. Since I went to LibraryThing as a cataloging site first and foremost, I really didn’t pay much attention to its social aspects, but I’m slowly getting more acquainted with those too. I’ll soon receive my first Early Reviewers book from them, and I plan on trying to get more!
I still have my GoodReads account, but I don’t always remember to update it, and it seems to be more about the socializing and less about the books – which is fine, but it’s not really why I set up an online book catalog. LibraryThing is giving me just what I want.
If you’re a LibraryThing-er too, let me know so I can check out your library!
Booking through Thursday: Trends
Have your book-tastes changed over the years? More fiction? Less? Books that are darker and more serious? Lighter and more frivolous? Challenging? Easy? How-to books over novels? Mysteries over Romance?
Don’t forget to leave a link to your actual response (so people don’t have to go searching for it) in the comments—or if you prefer, leave your answers in the comments themselves!
My reading tastes have certainly changed in some respects – and in nearly forty years of reading, I would think that they should. When I was younger, I read more genre – mainly mystery and fantasy – than I do these days, but fiction is still my first love book-wise, and probably always will be. I’ll branch into nonfiction mainly for memoirs, biography, and history, and I try for every third or fourth book I read these days to be nonfiction, which definitely is a change for me.
I have noticed in the last few years that I prefer reading books that are a bit less “literary;” critics may swoon over them, but I have found that some are too self-consciously “modern” or gimmicky for my taste, or more about style than content. I appreciate good writing, but not so much writing that calls attention to itself. Call me old-fashioned, but the traditional elements of character, plot, and theme still work for me (and generally in that order). I think my tastes probably qualify as solidly middlebrow, but not necessarily mainstream. Trade-paperback, non-genre, sometimes award-winning, sometimes book-club-sanctioned (any book club, not necessarily mine) fiction is what usually grabs me.
Is what you read now much different from what you read 5, 10, 20, however-many years ago? How has it changed?
What are you reading right now, and what’s happening on Page 123?
-
Pick up the nearest book, and open it to page 123.
-
Find the fifth sentence, and post the next three sentences.
I’ve just started Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, a memoir by Marie Brenner. It’s a review copy, and I’d like to finish it and get the review posted before we leave on vacation next Saturday.
Page 123 is the last page of Chapter 26. Things get a bit psychological here, it looks like:
Incongruent personalities were the rest of us, who keep peeking under the toadstools for someone to tell them how cool they are and who could, under extreme circumstances, wither and blow away if they felt unseen. It has to do with a need to feel pumped up like a balloon. If you had a full-blown case of the incongruent virus, you could deflate at the tiniest blip on your screen, doing a version of “poor me.”
This week’s Friday Fill-ins questions weren’t up as of Thursday night when I finished drafting this post, so it looks like I’ll be filling you in (get it? :-D) tomorrow!
If you’re interested in contributing a guest post to The 3 R’s for publication between June 15 and June 27, please contact me at 3.rsblog AT Gmail DOT com before Wednesday, June 11 – get more details here!
welcome to Tuesday Thingers! i’m glad you’re participating. 🙂 i have the same take on good reads vs. librarything. they’re all fun to play around with though. 🙂
Marie – Thanks for starting up a fun new meme. I’m looking forward to joining in often!
I had answered the Tuesday Thinger’s question before and so decided to skip it this week. I figured no one would really want to hear that story again–especially since I did a shortened version last week. 🙂
My mind was too occupied with work, I’m afraid to think up a BTT response and so I let that one go this week too. I think my reading has changed over the years–at least in the since that its expanded. I still go through phases where I read more of one type of book than another, but those are just minor fluctuations and don’t really amount to change on a large scale.
From your second paragraph in your BTT response, I’m not sure you would like the book I just finished, The Raw Shark Texts. LOL I think someone described it as post modern at one point. It’s definitely heavy on style–heck, if you flip through several pages quickly, it looks like a shark made out of phrases is coming right at you. It does have the elements of a traditional story: characters, plot and theme. But it’s heavy in style. Yes, even gimmicky. It’s a book I really want to talk about, I’m afraid, so you’re getting the brunt of it right now. Haha
I should have edited my comment before I hit send. Look at all those mistakes! Embarrassing.
Literary Feline – I don’t know whether I’ll do Tuesday Thingers every week, but I actually did have an answer for this one.
I thought the BTT question was kind of a “duh” in some ways; assuming someone has reached some stage of adulthood, wouldn’t one expect her reading tastes to have changed somewhat?
I’ll look forward to your review of that book, but you’re right; I might find the layout a bit distracting and possibly off-putting, so you’d have to sell me on the content :-).