LibraryThing, or Whoops!

[walkitout]

Okay, I've been sucked in. Here's how (it was an accident! Really!):

I'm reading _A Short History of Progress_, which coves a lot of the same ground covered by Brian Fagan's _The Long Summer_ (a really good book) and Jared Diamond's _Collapse_ (an okay book). Wright is kinda snippy about Diamond (mostly based on _Guns, Germs and Steel_ and rightly so) and while he's aware of Fagan's area of expertise, I think he probably hadn't seen _The Long Summer_. Wright annoys me with some of his summaries, but when he digs in, he's not bad, and I think where's he's going with this is actually really, really good.

So I think, hmm, has anyone else compared these three. I try searching on the three names, and stumble across LibraryThing's Author Cloud. What, I ask, am I looking at? It's very cool, ah, I get it, oh, I'm at LibraryThing. I., M. and others have all mentioned this. I'll give it a go.

Oh, dear. Innocent things like that. Now LibraryThing is _down_ and I am in withdrawal. I bought a lifetime membership. My login is rebeccaallen. I've ordered a Cue Cat and am thinking about cataloging the whole enchilada.

Comments

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

I am (perhaps unreasonably) amused that the first five books we have in common are all by Sandra Boynton. :)

not unreasonable at all

[walkitout]

Altho Boyton is giving me fits, because some of her books don't have author fields and so cannot be combined, so I keep getting recommendations for books by her I already have. However, I have emailed Abby and she says they are working on a pretty big change that will hopefully make that fixable.

I've got 1137 cataloged so far, and I don't have more than ten boxes to go, so I don't expect to break 1500. I still have a bunch of stuff cataloged wrong-edition, but I'm fixing that as I go. The recommendations are leading me in all kinds of interesting directions.

Wow.

[byrdie.livejournal.com]

I don't even have 200 books listed there yet.