New user hello

Hello All, I'm trying to get back into the swing of reading after many, many years. As a kid, I would often disappear into a book but that gift wore off with time, responsibilities, and the fragmenting effects of online life. I've had a bad streak of a few disappointing (but lauded) authors/novels recently and was casting about for a place to get recommendations and discussions - hence my joining. I have always preferred the Forum/listserv style of online interaction and was happy to find LibraryThing. I go way back to dialup bulletin boards and then Usenet before they got supplanted. I look forward to my time here.

The Old Guy in the Club

>1 OldGuyInTheClub: Welcome!! And a cheer for dialup bulletin boards and Usenet :) , which certainly broadened my mind and kept me in touch with life outside grad school during those long 9 years ...

The first few of those years were made longer and less smart than they could have been by my abandonment of recreational reading in the interests of Getting It Done, although the abandonment started during college.

I am on LT primarily because my initial life goal was to be a librarian; we own thousands of books and not enough shelves for them; someone, quite likely the elder of our two kids (for reasons not related to birth year), will have to deal with them someday; and cataloging LT lets me scratch my librarian itch while learning more about books & authors AND while counting as "house cleaning/organizing" 😄🤣 .

All of which is to say that I know there are places around here to get recomendations, but I've not visited them. However there are lots of friendly and helpful people here (occasionally disguised as curmudgeons) and I'm sure someone else can point the way.

>2 LeslieWx: Thank you for the warm welcome! I look forward to exploring all that LT has to offer. I have already read many thoughtful reviews and will consult them to help determine what to read next.

I have always loved libraries. As a middle schooler I was able to volunteer at my local helping the staff by shelf reading, putting books away, and so on. Good times.

>3 OldGuyInTheClub: As a middle schooler I was able to volunteer at my local helping the staff by shelf reading, putting books away, and so on. Good times.

Indeed! I remember doing similar things in my school libraries, possibly "in lieu of" attending the usually noisy study hall I'd been assigned to fill an empty slot in a schedule.

Hi, welcome. You're in a good place to find and discuss good books :)

If you have a specific thing you'd like to read, you might try asking for recs in https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/23175/Book-Recommendations-Requests . As for automatic recs by LT, they depend on books you've catalogued. The latest algorithm, which is the default that opens when you go to Home > Recommendations, require at least 100 to get any. But even before you catalogue those, there's plenty of recs to browse, most automatic, some by members. Aside from Home > Recommendations, work page for any book has a section with recs for similar books, including those contributed by members.

When I’m casting about for something new to read, sometimes I look at users with “Similar Libraries.” You can find those near the bottom of your profile page. Again, the fit gets better the more books you catalog. Another place I like to browse is “Lists.” You can find those from the Home page, in the navigation bar at the left under the heading “Discover.” For instance, the list Books We Want To Read Again For The First Time offers some titles that I’m in the enviable position of being able to read for the first time. The “Top Five Books” of the year lists are also where I find a lot of interesting suggestions. (You can find those by typing “top five books” in the search box in the upper right corner, then clicking “Lists” in the navigation bar at the left to search for just lists. The default is to search for books, but you can search a specific area of LibraryThing by selecting it from that navigation bar at the left.)

Hope you enjoy your time here!

@SandraArdnas and @Charon07
Thank you for the suggestions!

@OldGuyInTheClub Welcome! I'm a fairly new user to LT and am also always keen for reading suggestions in spite of already having a toppling mountain of To Be Read. (It's a happy magical attitude to have, to dream you will live long enough to read them all.)

I'm so glad you asked this question and that you got many excellent suggestions. I'm off now to check out Lists which I somehow have missed in my LT many meandering wanderings. Yay!
https://www.librarything.com/home#lists

Hm. How does one search lists by keyword(s)? I see lovely organized lists, but no search box for list names, which is surprisingly unlike LTs usual standard offering.

>9 DebiCates: You can use the whole site search to search for lists. "Lists" is an option on the left side menu

>9 DebiCates: The default of the search box in the upper right corner is to search for books, but you can search a specific area of LibraryThing by selecting it from the navigation bar at the left.

>10 norabelle414: OMG. Silly me. I should know that by now. I LOVE the universal site search.

You are handier than a pocket on a shirt.

>11 Charon07: You are as handy as a pocket on a shirt too!

>8 DebiCates: Pleased to meet you @DebiCates and I appreciate the pointer to Lists.

Funny that I didn't "get" that LT was a catalogging site right away but I am now considering entering my small library into it.

Speaking of which, a lot of the books I read aren't ones that I own but ones that I've checked out. Is there a way to flag owned vs. borrowed books?

>14 OldGuyInTheClub: The best way is to use collections. Besides the default collections you can create your own, but for this purpose it is usual to put the books you own into 'Your Library' and the borrowed (and discarded) ones into 'Read but Unowned'. You can see them together in'All collections'.

>15 MarthaJeanne: Thank you, I'll look for that feature!

Edit: Found and implemented. Glad to learn of this before I got too many books entered!

>15 MarthaJeanne: I don't know about usual, but if you consider ever book you've read as a member of your personal library, then you might want to add all of them to Your Library. You can still also add them to the Read but Unowned collection if you want and even create a Read but Owned collection if you like the symmetry.

>17 jjwilson61: But then you have no way of easily separating what you own without creating an additional collection. Also, the checkmarks will get all over the place instead of clearly showing owned vs unowned

>15 MarthaJeanne: Ahhhhh. The distinction of "Your library" is now finally clear to me. Thank you.

>18 SandraArdnas: I'm not clear on what you mean by the checkmarks. I still sometimes feel as much a newbie as when I started in August. Sorry if it's an obvious thing.

>20 DebiCates: On things such as an author page a green checkmark indicates the book is in Your Library (in the absence of other checkmarks). If you have it in Read but Unowned it will get a blue symbol; if it's in a custom collection it will get a grey icon.

The checkmarks have a hierarchy, there's more info on the help/wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Checkmarks

>21 Nevov: Aha. I will go look at some of my books now, as well as that wiki. Cool and thank you.

>22 DebiCates: To add to what Nevov said, aside from author pages, they show in many other places, series pages, award pages, lists, pretty much anything that shows multiple works. Search results are the only thing that comes to mind that doesn't show checkmarks if you've catalogued a book.

>23 SandraArdnas: Thank you. I thought I would see them (multiples) in my books. But now I think that I understand I'll only see one per title (per the wiki). I just saw some (green checkmark) in recommendations AND i can see what @jjwilson61 meant by "checkmarks will get all over the place instead of clearly showing owned vs unowned."