LibraryThing LibraryFun

I've had a LibraryThing account for a while now. I'd like to go back soon and enter more of my books-- I was surprised how quickly the list grew while I only got through one of my bookcases. It's so easy to enter them and a pleasurable thing to do because trying to think of which tags to apply had me remembering what the books were about and trying to recapture how they made me feel at the time. It was also interesting to discover that there were one or two people who not only had some of the same limited-ownership books as I did in their collections, but those people seemed to like many of the same bestselling titles.

The tagging seems to me both a strength and a weakness of LibraryThing. By not enforcing a defined glossary on catalogers, it makes it easy to enter books and may striker closer to the way that the average person thinks when they're looking for books on a topic. But there's also going to be a large range of specificity and broadness, plus people who have contrasting ideas of what tags belong with a book. With the large volume of books and people entering their collections, it likely is an effective way to tag books.

At least, I'd judge so by trying a couple titles in the Book Suggester. First, I tried an old favorite: Ross Poldark, by Winston Graham. The Suggester came back with the other titles in the Poldark series, which I've already read, but also Penmarric, which is also a historical novel set in Cornwall, and a couple titles by Daphne Du Maurier. A recent book I enjoyed, Dead Connection, by Alafair Burke, resulted in a list of other suspense novels. The Unsuggester is more of a wild card: it seemed like a hodge podge of books suggested at random. Perhaps I'd look there if I reach that desperate point of being out of things I want to read, but as per usual, there's a small stack of library books on the end of my kitchen table now waiting for their turn to be read. So many pages, so little time ...