Member aethercowboy

3,403 Books 9 Collections 605 Reviews 56 Recommendations

Collections: All collections (3,403), Your library (601), GT3 (1,922), Read but unowned (1,780), Have read (2,381), Currently reading (3), To read (4), Audiobook (1,172), eBook (235), 2026 (59)
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Groups: 75 Books Challenge for 2008, 75 Books Challenge for 2009, 75 Books Challenge for 2010, Board for Extreme Thing Advances, Bug Collectors, Hacking LibraryThing, Le Salon Littéraire du Peuple pour le Peuple, National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo), TinyCat, Tropic of Ideas, Until the hunt is done, Writer-readers
Joined: Oct 4, 2008

Real Name

Jacob

About My Library

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
-Arnold Lobel

My library contains all the books I have read and still own, and all the books I am currently reading.

Additionally, if I have borrowed a book from somebody or the public library, they will appear here.

I tend to have borderline bibliophily, so I do enjoy collecting books, even if the subject matter doesn't interest me. I'll read them all anyway, because that's what a good bibliophile does.

I dole out stars depending on how many relative utils a book provides me. 5 stars is equivalent to 2 relative utils; 4 stars is equivalent to 1 relative util; 3 stars is equivalent to 0 relative utils; 2 stars is equivalent to -1 relative util; and 1 star is equivalent to -2 relative utils. Half stars would naturally fall somewhere between the two (and a single half star is a truly horrid book for me).

Here it is in more humorous terms:

0.0 - I haven't read it, or haven't gotten around to rating it.
0.5 - I wouldn't wish this book on my worst enemy.
1.0 - I pray to the powers that be for an acute case of alexia.
1.5 - I would wish this book on my worst enemy, if the Geneva Convention allows.
2.0 - The Half Price Books employees are on a first-name basis with me.
2.5 - Can I have my time back, plz?
3.0 - Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
3.5 - This book was definitely worth reading.
4.0 - This is a good book.
4.5 - This is a pretty danged good book.
5.0 - This is (one of the) the best book(s) I've ever read!

To see what books I've read, click here.

About Me

I do so love cataloging my books. I'm also an avid reader and an author of mostly short fiction. I don't blame you if you've never heard of me.

In my free time, I design accounting and insurance software, and spend time with my wife, daughter and a noisy house cat, fixing up our shabby old house. Prior to that, I reverse-engineered ancient ECM tools and drove the migration of billions of documents from them to a more modern one. Before that, I helped send people, robots, and spiders into space, and get back again. And before that, I was designing a system to do bioinformatic data visualization and phylogenetic tree reconstruction in zebrafish. I also know how to operate platter-based 35mm film projectors.

You can check out my latest project, The Internet Literary Character Database: WhatCharacter.com. I also edit a speculative fiction magazine written (almost) entirely by AI: ArtifAIct.com.

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