Reading Books

[shannon_a]

My book collection used to be my absolute measure of what I'd read and what I hadn't. For any series that I was sufficiently interested in, if the book was on my shelves, that meant I'd read it. Sometimes, when I was more slowly reading through a series, a book on the shelf would be inverted to mark how far I'd gotten. I didn't ever intend to read most of those books again; they were just a collection and a checklist writ large.

About 10 years ago, my book collection took two major hits.

First, in 1996 I started working for Chaosium, and as a result my income dropped tremendously. It's never really recovered, though I have a tiny bit more money now than then.

Second, when Kimberly and I moved in together I sold off large portions of my collection. I've again culled my collection a few times since we've moved into our new house.

As a result I rarely buy new books any more. Instead I borrow them from friends or from the library, and I thus no longer have a permanent record of what I've read.

I really realized this was the case this evening when I started reading Lois McMaster Bujold's The Hallowed Hunt and it all started looking pretty familiar. I'm pretty sure I've read it before, and so it's going back to the library, but oddly even now I'm not totally sure.

Which is all pretty ironic because I'm just in the process of releasing a system at Xenagia's Book Index where you can record books when you read them, and thus have a good listing of what you've read (and when). It's actually fully released in a simple form at Xenagia, I just haven't announced it yet.

And it makes me wish I could go back and record all the things that I've read in the last couple of years, so that I had a record of all those books I've read since I started borrowing things, but I just don't know what they all were or when I read them ...

Comments

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

That's why I'm just so fond of my book list. My memory is like Swiss cheese, so it's great to be able to look back on what I've read this year and make recommendations to others about books that I might have otherwise forgotten.

Also, my time sense is terrible, so I oftentimes look back and am surprised that I just read such-and-such book this year.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Since about '92 I've kept a record of the books I've read on, you know, paper. Kind of low-tech, I know. (And of course I lost all of my records from 1992-98 when I had my fire. I do still have them from 1999 to the present.)