Member: nnicole

CollectionsYour library (855)

Reviews3 reviews

Tagsfantasy (120), français (119), bande dessinée (88), classics (77), funny (72), science fiction (71), it's a cookbook! (69), graphic novel (61), folklore (61), illustrated (59) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

Groups30-something LibraryThingers, Atheism and humanism, Californians Who LT, Doctor Who, Favorite Bookstores, I Survived the Great Vowel Shift, Making Light Denizens, Professor Bernice Summerfield Has A Posse, Rare, Old or Offbeat, The 'verse

Favorite authorsDouglas Adams, Dave Barry, Peter S. Beagle, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Garth Nix, John Scalzi, Connie Willis (Shared favorites)

About meMild-mannered engineer by day... mild-mannered engineer by night... freelance superheroine on alternate prime-numbered Tuesdays.
Hobbies include dancing (English Country, Morris (Cotswold), and Irish low-style and ceilidh), blinding people with science (I have a Master's degree... in science!), playing the bones, making coffee, drinking coffee, and--when time permits--pretending to work.
Lives in a happy house with housemate, two cats (mine and hers), and mortgage.

About my library*Excessively geeky, with tropisms for SFF and folklore. I also have a distinct weakness for perty perty pikturz; hence, the illustrated kids' books.

*Some books are in French. I've tried to mark them, but I'm not necessarily done tagging yet.

*Though I've had bandes dessinees (B.D.s) my whole life, I'm just now getting into American comics. That's why many of them are movie/TV/other media tie-ins.

*For "date": unless it's somehow relevant, I try to put in the date of original publication, not the date that whatever copy I have was published. A listing for, say, "Hamlet" with publication date of, say, "2005" just looks odd to me.
**Updated: apparently this is at odds with how LT wants us to use dates. *sigh* I'll be going through and fixing them.

----------------------------

About the tags:
* I use "history" for books ABOUT history, and "historical" for books that are themselves of historical interest (generally published before 1900). A book may be both: Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain", for example.

* Omnibuses (omnibii?) or short story collections get awards tags (e.g. "hugo winners") if at least one story contained therein received the award (in this example, a Hugo (in any category)). One book gets a maximum of one award tag for the same award, regardless of how many stories received the award. Example: Connie Willis' "Winds of Marble Arch" gets ONE "hugo winners" tag and ONE "nebula winners" tag, though it reprints several Hugo and/or Nebula winning stories. I've made NO attempt to attach the award tag to the story that won it--all you can tell from a short story collection tagged "hugo winners" and "nebula winners" is that at least one story--possibly but not necessarily the same story--won each award.

* Short stories vs. essays vs. anthologies: There's a fair amount of overlap. I tend to use "essays" for collections of short nonfiction, "short stories" for collections of short narrative fiction, and "anthologies" for collections of everything else (e.g. poems, scripts...)

* Illustrated vs. graphic novel: in what I call a "graphic novel", story and pictures are laid out in the familiar comics sequential format (lots of boxes). "Illustrated" works may be richly/lavishly/beautifully decorated/illustrated, but don't have the same sequential feel as comic books. Sometimes I use "illustrated" to indicate that I'm especially fond of the pictures in my copy of the work: e.g. my copy of "The Land of Little Rain", which is illustrated with Ansel Adams photos.

*Use of the "heroine" tag can be a little vague and/or spotty. The sort of books I use it for are books that, if they'd been written fifty or maybe even fifteen years ago, would have had male protagonists as a matter of course: a pulpy space opera starring an adventuring archaeologist, for instance, or a young sorceror's coming-of-age quest, or the story of the last and most powerful member of a long line of inventors/mad scientists carving a trail of mayhem through Europe. Strong, nuanced, smart, flawed, well-rounded characters, very much the heroes of their own stories, who happen to be female.

*Alternate worlds vs. alternate history vs. fantasy vs. historical fantasy
** "Alternate worlds" stories are set on worlds recognizably LIKE ours (e.g. continents/countries/major cities correspond to our world), but with one or more key differences in the fabric of the world. Tend to feature travel between alternates. Example: Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy.
** "Alternate history" stories are set on THIS world, where a known historical event or events turned out differently. Example: Philip K. Dick's "The Man In The High Castle".
** "Steampunk" gets its own tag, because it's that cool.
** "Fantasy" stories are set in worlds that were never intended to correspond exactly to our world (e.g. high fantasy).
** Worlds best described as "our world, except with magic" are usually tagged "urban fantasy". Actual city not required.
** Worlds best described as "urban fantasy, except in the past" are tagged "historical fantasy".

*Science fiction vs. fantasy
Are the same, per Clarke's Magic-Technology Equivalency Theorem. Still, most works have a "feel" of one or the other, and are tagged accordingly.

*Urban fantasy vs dark fantasy vs fantasy
"Fantasy" is a catchall tag. When it appears alone, it generally means high fantasy: Tolkienesque sword'n'sorcery tales like the ones lampooned in "The Tough Guide To Fantasyland". I use "urban fantasy" for works that are set basically in our world, except with magic. "Dark fantasy" is a little trickier. I use it as a sort of horror/fantasy hybrid: for works that, while they may superficially treat with subjects traditionally associated with children (e.g. folk tales), are in fact nightmare-inducing. "Pan's Labyrinth" is an excellent example of what I mean by "dark fantasy".

Homepagehttp://ellipticcurve.livejournal.com

Also onBoardGameGeek, BookMooch, eBay, Last.fm, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Wikipedia

Real nameNicole the Wonder Nerd

LocationLos Angleles, CA

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/nnicole (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/nnicole (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (183), Awards (273), Characters (2870), Places (703)

Member sinceApr 7, 2006