I love books. Real, paper books. I love the feel of the paper, the weight on my chest, the smell… I purchase books to support the authors and so I can make notes in the margins and underline passages. I only keep the books I might read again and donate the others to local library.
With the recent discovery of some new (to me) authors (Robert Crais, Walter Mosley, Mick Herron, Don Winslow), I was out of room. Stacks of books everywhere. So time for more bookshelves. I can almost hear them sigh.
“He wondered now how many people there were […] living their back-up plan; who were office drones or office cleaners, teachers, plumbers, shop assistants, IT mavens, priests and accountants only because rock and roll, football, movies and authordom hadn’t panned out. And decided that the answer was everyone. Everyone wanted a life less ordinary. And only a tiny minority ever got it, and even they probably didn’t appreciate it much.”
— Slow Horses (Mick Herron)
“Pike was good at waiting, which was why he excelled in the Marines and other things. He could wait for days without moving and without being bored because he did not believe in time. Time was what filled your moments, so if your moments were empty, time had no meaning. Emptiness did not flow or pass; it simply was. Letting himself be empty was like
putting himself in neutral: Pike was.”
— The Last Detective (Robert Crais)
LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book metadata. It is used by authors, individuals, libraries, and publishers. It went live on August 29, 2005 and has 2,600,000 users and over 155 million books catalogued. (Wikipedia)
I started using LibraryThing in September of 2005 and currently have 896 books in the database: 596 fiction, 236 non-fiction… by 336 authors. Some of my favorites:
John Sandford (43)
Michael Connelly (33)
Lawrence Block (31)
Sue Grafton (23)
Elmore Leonard (23)
John D. Macdonald (22)
Robert B. Parker (22)
Ross Thomas (21)
Bill Granger (15)
John Grisham (15)
William Gibson (14)
Carl Hiaasen (13)
Neal Stephenson (13)
Robert K. Tanenbaum (12)
James S. A. Corey (11)
Gregory Mcdonald (11)
Robert Parker (11)
James Patterson (11)
Nelson DeMille (10)
I continue to fine-tune my tags. Still the best snap-shot of my interests.
PS: Amazon says I’ve purchased more than 700 books starting in 1998.
Given my fondness for speculative/science fiction, I was a little surprised I didn’t have a tag for ‘dystopia.’ Many of my favorite novels are set in “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.”
Snow Crash, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Twenty Thirty, The Handmaid’s Tale, Mockingbird, and –of course– much/most of William Gibson’s work (The Peripheral, Agency, the Bridge Trilogy, and pretty much all the early stuff).