I believe I started making list of books I wished to read when I was in high school. To illustrate the ginormity of my inner geekiness, I suspect I was the only 16 year old who skipped school to go to the library in order to look up books about books. From these tomes, I accumulated volumes of paper, all of which are lined with my elegant-yet-totally-unreadable handwriting, all of which list books I wished to read. Most of these earlier lists are in a file, in a box, in my parents' garage. I shall probably take them with me when I move out of state again because God Forbid I should give up my lists.
In any case, what do these lists consist of? Well, they are books, sometimes songs, with title and author. Why I wrote them down and from where, I do not know. Only past Lazaraspaste can answer that question. But here are some of them in a folder I found when cleaning out my paperwork during the holiday break. My goal is to consolidate them, but I don't know how I will do this. I think I need an iPhone because I would like one centrally located, ever accessible list so that when I am standing in the airport bookstore or the Barnes and Noble or the used bookstore, I will be able to call up my grand and teetering list and figure out what to buy. Not, if my 500+ books listed on LibraryThing is any indication, that I don't have enough books already but clearly I have a problem.
I know many of you have Kindles or Sonys and while I would like an ereader, I'm not a fan of the fact that the formats are so rigid. I would like to have the option of buying ebooks from anywhere and having the format be easily transferred to my ereader. Also, I can't afford it. If I get an iPhone, I can't get an ereader and I think I would use the iPhone more. If any of you out there have any opinion on this, please share with me.
I enjoy list making. Although, as a consummate and perpetual list-maker, I find certain kinds of lists disgraceful. For example, The Top 100 Books of the Century or the Year's Best. Well, not really. I mean, its very arbitrary, list-making is and any you make is going to have problems, even for you. You'll invariably forget something important. This is how To Do lists and grocery lists work as well. The best lists are ones that admit to their randomness and then explain what the book is about and why they've included it. My personal favorite of this sort is anything by Michael Dirda. Michael Dirda works for the Washington Post and has very broad tastes. I have discerned this from reading Classics for Pleasure, a book that jumps around genres quite liberally. Something I appreciate as a romance reader.
One of the chief reasons I became a librarian was my love of list making (I also like indices but let's not go there). What is a library catalog if not a gigantic list? What are the shelves if not the physical manifestation of that list? Libraries, in recent years, have become less about books and more about other shit. Like community education and technology, and while that's all fine and good, we still need books. I'm not one of those people who thinks that books will disappear because the thing about a book is that aside from the ability to read, you only need sunlight to operate one. This is very handy. I do not trust technology because technology breaks. It does. It does all the time. Things don't download. You lose everything if you don't back up. Things are scattered and hither and yon and you have to recollect them whenever you transfer to a new device. I've lost songs going from one computer to another, even with Geek Squad shifting everything over. I do not like the idea of losing my collections. I realize I'm a rarity but then while I think they're are many readers out there, there are even less people who are literate and even fewer book lovers. Yes, I am a terrible snob, thank you. I think a book is a piece of art. Its like owning a painting. I also have this theory that literacy, not just the ability to read but the ability to read for more than one meaning, works out to about the same percentage that its always been. I know people who don't read the same book more than once. This I find very shocking. I mean, how are you to know the book if you don't read it more than once? How can you possibly pick up nuance, say?
In any case, I'm looking for better ways to make lists. If I can incorporate technology into my listmaking, that would be great. We'll see.
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