26 July 2009

Goodread-ing

I've had a Goodreads account for quite some time - since August of 2007 to be exact - but I never really made much use of it. I think I only entered 10 books and joined two groups and that was kind of that. I'd get the email updates for a few of my friends (one friend has over 1000 books in her profile, so she was obviously getting mileage out of it) but never felt terribly compelled to visit much until last night.

I'm not sure how I wound up on Goodreads last night. I think it might have been because I dropped by Lauren Willig's site for news about Pink VI or Lizzie Skurnick may have mentioned Goodreads reviews on her blog. So I signed into Goodreads for the first time in nearly two years and proceeded to follow Lauren and Lizzie, re-arrange some books, play trivia, stalk, er, follow Alain de Botton, and waste a good 3 hours of sleeping time in general.

Moving forward to today, I combined this new thirst for all things Goodreads with my mission of culling the rapidly growing book collection. I entered all the books in my "in-progress" bedside bin, the "TBR" books on my desk, the new book I bought today (The Big Rewind by Nathan Rabin), and then proceeded to go entry-by-entry through my book journals starting in 2003 to update my "read" list. I didn't put every single entry in - that would be nuts - and I didn't even have accurate information on some of the books I either DNF'd or got rid of (hastily). I rapidly discovered that searching isn't all that accurate by title and ISBN is far more accurate causing me to look up books at B&N then copy-and-paste the ISBN into Goodreads. I also discovered a mistake where the publisher data for RHI and B&N editions of Dorian Gray were mixed up causing the RHI data to appear on the B&N page of Goodreads (and I know I had the right ISBN because I got the book and checked).

I also updated the Goodreads widgets on my blog to those really snazzy montage widgets. I have three now. Since I'm a nerd.

I increased my Goodreads shelf count to 204.

I culled 10 books from the collection. It's better than I had been doing.

I've got some reviews to write (both movie and book) and some knitting to finish. Catch y'all later.

1 comment:

  1. I've only been a Goodreads member since May of this year. I have won two member giveaways - The Rooftops of Tehran (a great book) and Saffron Dreams (just arrived in the mail today). I love having another place where you can talk to authors.

    My only issue is keeping GR, LT, B&N and my personal Libra in sync!

    I like your montages!

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