Question about Tags

When you're tagging a book, how do your differentiate between:

1. memoir and autobiography

2. thriller and mystery

I wouldn't. I'd call all of the former memoirs and all of the latter mysteries.

Having said that, I went back to take a look at my tags and then changed one thriller to a mystery and two autobiographies to memoirs!
:-)

If you are more selective about the categories you choose up front, it helps later when you want to pull them all up.

I have

a biographies and memoirs tag for all of them

autobiographies

biographies

collective biographies

craft of biography

Influenced by my cataloguing training on that one but it seems to make sense. On the shelves, they are all shelved together in author order, with the collectives then the books about biography at the end

Thanks for your suggestions -- I'm still mulling it over.

I'm not sure about the difference between memoir and biography, but I just checked the difference between thriller and mystery (though I'm sure there are exceptions and overlaps). In a mystery, the detective (professional or amateur) tries to solve a murder and usually doesn't confront the criminal until the end. In a thriller, the reader follows both the criminal and the hero and sees the crime happening. There's a good description by Barbara D'Amato on mystery vs. suspense vs. thriller at:
http://www.arrtreads.org/newsletter.htm (ARRT Newsletter, Winter 2006)

Where did this idea come from that a mystery must have a murder? That's not true at all! Certainly most mysteries do, but it's not a requirement. Look at Gaudy Night, or Clouds of Witness. Brilliant mysteries - no murders.

As to memoir vs. biography, that's easy. A memoir is written by someone about their own life; a biography is written by someone about someone else's life. The more difficult question is memoir vs. autobiography. I tend to see the former as being about a discrete episode or episodes in the author's life, while the latter covers her entire life.

I don't have many mystery/thrillers, so I lump them all together. I tend to keep the memoirs and autobiographies together - I even put the fictional ones in - because they're written similarly, and I try to keep my tags on the simple side.