view larger

Member: preater

Library862 books — see library

ReviewedNone so far

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

Tagsread (325), nonfiction (318), fiction (314), unread (149), library book (105), chevin books (96), durham university library (75), politics (54), philosophy (49), computing (46) — see all tags

GroupsBookcases: If You Build/Buy Them, They Will Fill, Build the Open Shelves Classification, Combiners!, Cutter, reloaded, I See Dead People['s Books], Lib 2.0, Librarians who LibraryThing, LibraryThing for Libraries

Favorite authorsMargaret Atwood, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse, A. M. Homes, Primo Levi, Karl Marx, Octave Mirbeau, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath (Shared favorites)

Favorite bookstoresChevin Books, Dawn Treader Book Shop, Motte & Bailey, Booksellers, Oxfam Bookshop, Low Petergate, York

About me I do not own enough books, but I am still sometimes asked why I have more books in the house than I have read. I don't understand this, how could you not end up with more books than you've read? What do you do if you've read the last book but have forgotten to buy another one? What do you do when you have an opportunity to buy many books at once, e.g. walking past a bookshop?

I mention this as an excuse to quote a joke Mark Steel tells about his exposure as a young man to the book-filled houses of his fellow left-wing activists:

I'd never considered that you could have more than about twenty books. It was quaint and charmingly eccentric, but you just didn't need that many books. Having 300 books was like having fifty kettles. And how would you ever read them all? It took me three months to read a book and then three months to work up to the next one. Three hundred books would last me 150 years. These people were wasting their money. (From Reasons To Be Cheerful.)

The cartoon of me is by Rosie Brooks. I'm holding the logo of Vim, the best text editor.

About my library These are books from my shelves and a some I store 'off site' at my mother's house. I also add books borrowed from libraries and friends, following a suggestion on Karen Schneider's blog (tags: library book, borrowed). Purists hate this, but it's great for LibraryThing's recommendations.

If you are planning on buying me a book as a present: first please do this, I quite like books. Second, if it's tagged wishlist, it means I don't own it but would like to (hint).

Also onFacebook, Last.fm

Real nameAndrew Preater

LocationYork, UK

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

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

Member sinceApr 7, 2006