Member: slvanmoer

1776 was a very quick read. I wonder if he rushed it out under a book contract and the original intent was to cover the entire war.

posted by encephalical at 2:40 pm (EST) on Dec 10, 2009

Well, I gave up on "Collected Poems" of Edward Arlington Robinson. I was about 130 pages in and had just started a poem called Captain Craig, that was going to be about 30 pages that was looking like it was going to be maudlin "Tuesday's with Morrie" type schlock and I said, "Life is too short."

posted by encephalical at 2:27 pm (EST) on Dec 7, 2009

the "Read but Unowned" collection is one of the default collections. I bet you could find out on one of the newsgroups/blogs, but I bet it was created because some people were using LT just to keep track of the things they read and others were using it to keep track of everything they owned and this was causing people to get connected that really shouldn't/didn't want to be.

With the different collections, you can get different recommendations. So you can get recommendations based on what you've read, what you haven't read, what's at work, what's at home. etc.

Also, the collections keep you from littering up the tag system. The tags should ideally be descriptive of the content, that will help the recommendation and searching functions. If every book is tagged as "read", that doesn't really help anyone, it would be like if every book was tagged as "book", well, duh.

I see tags as replacing Dewey decimal and Library of Congress listings. Those are essentially 1 dimensional maps, one book to one number. And so you sort everything, but tags are more like the search engine way of looking at the world, you search and tags are what organize the search.

posted by encephalical at 3:32 pm (EST) on Dec 2, 2009

I'm reorganizing all my collections and tags. Removing tags like "read", "to read" and putting those into Collections of same name. Idea is that tags should be used for helping others search and categorize.

Right now I have Read, Read but Unowned and Owned but Unread. I think I'm going to change Read but Unowned to be in two collections, Read and Unowned. Owned but Unread I might change to just Owned, and if it's not in Read, it's not in Read. I also have Partially Read.

I'm not using "Your Library" at all. There's something about that pronoun that annoys me. Like in WinXP where it's all "My Documents", "My Computer", instead of just "Documents" and "Computer". (they've fixed that in Win7).

And yes, you're still on the hook for picture scanning.

posted by encephalical at 5:09 pm (EST) on Nov 30, 2009

I'm thinking of trying to catalog mom's library over break. I'll get there Wednesday night. Meeting some people Thursday night and trying to see 1-2 people on Friday, going back Saturday morning. She has approx 1000 books, so ~500 on Thurs and Friday. I'd just be typing down the ISBNs.

Would go a lot faster if somebody was there to dictate...

posted by encephalical at 10:59 am (EST) on Nov 23, 2009

After Emma I need to try and barrel through the Edwin Arlington Robinson Collected Poems I started in the summer. And the Mies Van Der Rohe bio I'm about halfway through. I don't know if I'll read the Dali books or just look at them.

posted by encephalical at 11:46 am (EST) on Nov 18, 2009

56 also. Since 52, finished "Overcome Neck and Back Pain" and "Julius Schulman, Modernism Revisited" from my partially read stack, plus "The Rest is Noise" and "Stalingrad" as new.

About 100 pages into Emma, I think it's the best Austen I've read yet.

More Russo? Aren't you done with that guy yet?

posted by encephalical at 10:52 am (EST) on Nov 17, 2009

I sorted by entry date then just subtracted the ones I obviously didn't read this year, like the Little House on the Prairie series.

Hmmm... this is an interesting test, in my library, I have the view set so that the columns are:

Title, Author, Date, Collections, Rating, Tags, Entry Date

it's possible that you don't see the columns I've set, but your default columns.

posted by encephalical at 5:21 pm (EST) on Nov 10, 2009

There was some interesting stuff in it, but I got really annoyed that whenever he said, "so and so altered the course of 20th century music" he meant "so and so altered the course of 20th century academic music that only a handful of grad students have had to suffer through listening to."

Finally at the last chapter he says, "of course, you can't really make a distinction between classical music and popular music." Then why do you just write 500 pages and only mention the Beatles like twice? (not that I'm a huge Beatles fan.)

Here's something by the major post WWII french composer (according to the book):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uanfKvqlj...

posted by encephalical at 3:11 pm (EST) on Nov 2, 2009

I'm at 52 books completed for the year. What are you at? I don't think I'll make 100. 75 is doable.

posted by encephalical at 2:34 pm (EST) on Oct 19, 2009