Thing #9: Exorsising my LibraryThing Demons

Goodness, it's been a while. I was so sure I'd be totally done with all 23 things by now! But I'm finally back, anyway. I think I had a LibraryThing block. I'll explain...

To tell the truth, I've been a member of LibraryThing for almost three years now. I heard of it when it first launched, and in a burst of enthusiasm I ponied up $25.00 for a full lifetime premium membership, enabling me to add as many books to my account as I chose (the free membership only entitles one to catalog a paltry 200 books). I picked a few random books from my collection and cataloged them on my account, astounded at the ease with which LibraryThing spat out the full MARC record on any and every title I typed in, including the most obscure, with just a few keyword clues.

Then... I did nothing. All around me, online friends were cataloging their books and their kids' books and rating and reviewing their books and tagging them and making tag clouds and making connections with other LibraryThing members and and posting their collections on their blogs ... there was, and is, an ENDLESS amount of stuff you could do with LibraryThing.

It was overwhelming.

Anyway, I already had a list of all the books I'd read since 1999: it was handwritten, in a scruffy old spiral notebook, and I kind of boggled at the idea of transferring my records of all 1,000+ books from my beloved book log onto LibraryThing just so that I could put my list online. I mean, sure, adding a few books to a LibraryThing account is easy-peasy, but that much cataloging at once felt too much like...well, like work.

So, LibraryThing has been sort of a guilty barely-started project of mine lo these past three years. Like an Internet version of the scarf I once tried to knit, that ended up buried in the bottom of my teenage closet, a sad little skein of yarn with a few holey knitted rows all stuffed in a wrinkled paper bag.

But now, now I must confront my demons. For my job. So, I opened up LibraryThing again. Dug up my account information, only to discover that my "lifetime" unlimited account seemed to have reverted to basic-member status. Emailed the very kind and friendly LibraryThing staff and got my premium account reinstated.

And today, at long last, I have figured out what I will do with my LibraryThing account: I will use it to keep track of the Readers' Choice award books I read each year. That's nice and clearly defined, and much less scary than thinking I'm going to have to catalog my whole collection, or all the books I've read in the past ten years.


So. I just logged in to LibraryThing and added five Stellar Award nominees: three that I've read, one that I'm reading now, and one that I have checked out and plan to read soon. I'll keep them in my paper book log, too, but it's nice to have made peace with LibraryThing at long last.


Over on the sidebar you'll find some random books from my LibraryThing. Can you tell which ones I added back in 2005 and which are new?