by the time you’ve read these . . .

. . . you’ll have gone right around the world.

LibraryThing is having another book pile contest. I decided to join in this time – with a few books I’ve been picking up that are from different parts of the world. Here’s my entry:

In ascending order, there’s crime fiction from Sweden, Palestine, Slovakia, Turkey, Brazil, Botswana, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Iceland, Scotland, and Canada – with a non-fiction book about China, thrown in for good measure. (We’re reading John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons as a college common reading this year.)

By the way, LibraryThing is fun – and it’s where I keep track of what I’ve been reading, which is handy when you have a terrible memory.

LibraryThing in the Philly Inquirer

Katie Haegele, who writes an interesting column for the Philadelphia Inquirer on things digital and literary, has just published an article on LibraryThing. She has an extensive zine collection and was pleased to find, when she started to catalog them, that Jenna Freedman of Barnard (where she is curator of a great zine collection) had already cataloged a good many of them, and those records could be pulled into LibraryThing and shared. Jenna (who creates her own zine, by the by, titled Lower East Side Librarian) put her in touch with me as a certified Thingoholic and librarian. So we chatted about how LT tagging and social functions are a DIY response to the withering of cataloging in libraries and as a fun example of the social dimensions of reading.

Now, if I could just figure out why OCLC is so expensive and LibraryThing is so free . . .