Member: YaacovLozowick

I've been using LibraryThing for a while now and I absolutely love it. Before I started with LibraryThing, I kept my own pseudo-blog with book and movie reviews. LibraryThing makes the entire process much simpler and, as you've noted, allows me to connect with others who have similar interests. Similarly, if someone happens to like (or dislike) a particular book, they can see what else others with similar tastes have liked or disliked. I also find it fascinating to see why people liked a book that I disliked and vice versa. The best recent example of this would be "The Boy in Striped Pajamas". I really enjoyed the book and gave it a good review. I happened to see that another reviewer gave it a poor review (well, several gave it poor reviews but most of those reviews were worthless). The bad review that caught my eye focused on the trivialization of the Holocaust and the concern that the reader had to accept the improbable ignorance and innocence of the protagonist. I found that there was nothing in the negative review with which I disagreed, but that I came away from the story with a different impression.

Incidentally, one other thing to note. I went into your record for "Right to Exist" and went to the Editions screen. From there, I was able to combine your copy of the book with the copies owned by other LibraryThing users. Before I did that, there were 36 users with "my version" and 1 user with "your version" even though they were all the same work. Now, if you look at your library, you'll see that 37 people have that same "work". That is another of the powerful things that LibraryThing can do. Users can, as a community, build up the library of knowledge about each particular work and correct mistakes that some users may have made when entering the work.

One last thing: You might be interested in my

posted by MSWallack at 5:01 pm (EST) on Dec 8, 2008