Remember to tag your books!

Don't forget to tag your books '999 challenge' so that we can all see what you are reading.

I have 81 tags for 999 Challenge.

I'm wondering how the tag pages work. According to the work page for The Brothers Karamazov, 7 people have it tagged '999 challenge' yet if you look on the '999 challenge' tag page, the book is not even listed (at least not for me). Weird.

Should we tag only books that we've read or also books we're planning to read?

I've tagged the 72 out of 81 books that I physically have in the house for the 999 challenge. I've read 10 so far.

Therefore, I've tagged the ones I'm planning to read.

So far I'm tagging them 999 Challenge as I read them. 14 so far. I don't want to have to retag them if I make a change.

I tagged the ones that I'm planning to read. When I've changed a book, I have removed the tag so that I only have 81 books tagged for the challenge.

If I had to go thru all that tagging and untagging, particularly since 999 challenge is not a short tag, i'd never get books read. Besides, I know what books are in my challenge, and i know what books are being read by the people whose threads I've starred, so i'm not sure what the big deal is to "see what everyone is reading." Seems to me i spend too much time making things look pretty, and not enough time reading.

just my curmudgeonly old lady 3 cents worth!

I think it will make a great list/meme at some point - and be a step towards some more organic LT "best of" lists in the future. Although 3 is right about the tag page - something's afoot - only 2 books have the tag used 4 times:

The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel by Kathleen Kent
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

It says I've used it 49 times, but only shows 2 books in the raw count...of course you can go to my library and see the 49 I've tagged so far.

ETA - I've opened up something in bug collectors - I want to know why now! Total credit to VictorialPL's BrotherK example!

I'm tagging mine 999 Challenge as I read them. My challenge lists are only possibilities. I'd hate to feel that I have to read the books I've listed!

Question: Do "999 Challenge" and "999 challenge" show up together?

>10 ivyd:

Yes, they do.

I don't quite understand the 999 challenge tag page. but things are definitely wrong elsewhere, too.

I went to the 999 Challenge group page, and put "999 Challenge" into the Search Group Member's Libraries field in the upper right. A list of books came up, but there is a whole slew of books that are listed as in my library, but are not. Unless I'm doing something wrong, there's definitely a glitch somewhere.

I tagged all the ones I own that I was planning to read, but some are library books, and I don't include those in my shelf.

I wonder why the tag page is all weird? I assumed it was because people hadn't tagged their books, but if that's not it, then I don't understand why more books are showing up on that page.

I tagged both the ones I've read and the ones I am certain I am going to read. Like others, I have some in my categories that I may change depending on my mood.

Interesting - it seems to be working now! I was going to try to do a top 10, but that ended in the 4 time usage - so it's a top 15 for the 999 Challenge list:

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (7)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (6)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (5)
The Watchmen by Alan Moore (5)
Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt (5)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (5)
John Adams by David McCullough (4)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (4)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (4)
Emma by Jane Austen (4)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (4)
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel (4)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (4)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (4)
The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent (4)

It's fun to watch which books are being the most read by 999 participants. Today the top book is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

You can follow this item of interest here or here.

My books are tagged 999, and I only tag as I read them (I have no unread books in my library, anyway).

I've just tagged the books I've read so far this year for the 999 challenge. It is interesting to see which books are involved.

However, I do note that I get different results depending on whether I search for "999" or "999 challenge" so this is skewing the results.

Yes, I've been told by the combiners group that '999' and '999 challenge' are two completely different things and that the tags should not be combined. Something about 999 being for emergency services.

So we should NOT use 999 as a tag for our 999 books?

I'm not going to go so far as to say that. It's your tag.

I'd say to use "999 challenge" for any books you're doing for a 999 challenge. I'm saying this because that tag has, by far, the larger number of entries.

#21 - I'm not going to go so far as to say that. It's your tag.
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Exactly. You should use the tag that works for you. It's your library. In my case 999 works with my tagging conventions.

I decided to check again - doing a top 15 at the 4s isn't possible now (it would be more of a top twenty-something) - so we can do a top 11:

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (9)
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (8)
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (6)
4. The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett (5)
5. Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt (5)
6. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (5)
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (5)
8. The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel by Kathleen Kent (5)
9. Watchmen by Alan Moore (5)
10. American Gods by Neil Gaiman (5)
11. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (5)

Our top 3 remains unchanged - although all have picked up new tags since last month in order to retain their spots. Within the top 11, nearly all had been at least in the top 15 before, but we have three new entries! The Pillars of the Earth, Eclipse and American Gods are all new to the top 11 list.

Note, this is based on raw counts of the '999 Challenge' tag. Snapshot taken around 7:30 AM on March 6th. Your mileage may vary.

:)

thanks Stephmo, that's very interesting!

Cool, 2 of mine on the list - Northanger Abbey and The Book Thief. Nice to see Possession here, a fantastic book.

Ooh - some more movement - and it's a Top-15 using 5 or more tags now:

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (9)
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (8)
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (8)
4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman (6)
5. Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt (5)
6. Watchmen by Alan Moore (5)
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (5)
8. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (5)
9. The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett (5)
10. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (5)
11. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (5)
12. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (5)
13. The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel by Kathleen Kent (5)
14. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (5)
15. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (5)

New entries include Eclipse, The Wordy Shipmates, The Reader and the Pillars of the Earth!

It's been a while - and now there are 22 books with 5 or more folks using the 999 challenge tag:

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (9)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (7)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (7)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (6)
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (6)
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel by Diane Setterfield (6)
The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett (6)
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (5)
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (5)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (5)
Watchmen by Alan Moore (5)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (5)
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (5)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (5)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (5)
Brick Lane by Monica Ali (5)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (5)
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (5)
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (5)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (5)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (5)
Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt (5)

Again, the top three are the same, although it appears that Mrs. Dalloway and the Brothers Karamazov both lost a reader.

The Twilight series is almost represented - only the second book fails to have at least 5 tags.

It would appear that Dostoevsky picked up some fans during the group read, as his Crime & Punishment is a new addition to the list.

Stephenie Meyer and Fyodor Dostoevsky are the only authors with multiple books being read and tagged by five or more people.

1001 Books You must read before you die is getting a healthy workout with this list - depending on which edition you're working.

All in all, it also shows the diversity LTers have when it comes to books!

Edited - typo, clarity on tag, sentence to make sense!

Thanks for pulling that together stephmo!

Like Nickelini I've used 999. It's shorter! Quite a few others have too, judging by this list.

I would have gladly used 999 vice 999 challenge, but I thought somewhere early on we were told not to use the 999 alone. BTW, it's very easy to change one from the other by editing the tab itself rather than going to each book, so once the group decides, I can change back to 999 if that's what everybody is using.

Tutu,
What happened is that I asked the Combiners group if we could merge '999' and '999 challenge' and was told no because some individuals use 999 to mean emergency services and not our challenge. Apparently 999 is like 911 in some portions of the world.

>32 VictoriaPL: Yeah, what VictoriaPL said.

I'm not entirely sure who really is really using 999 in that way, but much like SF and "Science Fiction" or "SciFi" can't be combined because someone might use SF to mean "San Francisco" or "Speculative Fiction," they remain separate.

Oddly, 911 is completely combined into 9/11, so apparently no one cares that we might want the 911 tag for emergency services to be different from the tragedy of September 11th, but who am I to question?

Oh - overall usage:

999 challenge:
Tag and its aliases used 5,099 times by 109 users
999:
Tag used 964 times by 50 users.

I find it oddly amusing that there books tagged with the emergency services number (whether it's 911 or 999). Are a lot of LT members reading books about emergency services? Is it important to tag these books suchly? Perhaps it is, but I just find it amusing.

Another update - 24 books now tagged 5 or more times:

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (9)
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (7)
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (7)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (6)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (6)
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (6)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (6)
The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett (6)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (6)
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (6)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (6)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (6)
Brick Lane by Monica Ali (5)
John Adams by David McCullough (5)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (5)
New Moon by Stephenie Meyer (5)
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (5)
Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt (5)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (5)
Chocolat by Joanne Harris (5)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (5)
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (5)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (5)
Watchmen by Alan Moore (5)

Some more movement:

- New Moon came out of hiding and now the entire Twilight Series shows up in the most-tagged challenge books.
- Last time we checked, the only other author to have multiple books was Dostoevsky - well, he's out. But Neil Gaiman takes over for him and now has two books on the list!

Other bits of randomness:
- For all the graphic novel categories, only Alan Moore's Watchmen is cracking 5 shared readers. How's that for showing the breadth of a category?
- Can The Book Thief crack double digits soon?
- Did you know that over 500 '999 Challenge' tags were added since the last time we checked this?

awesome!

Thanks for putting together this list each month, stephmo. It makes for interesting reading to see what books we are reading.

Finally, one of my books read this year made the most widely read list!!

And this month, it's a top 17 - because at 5 tags or more it would be a to 29 and that would be a lot more work for me. :P

Tag and its aliases used 6,128 times by 111 users - think we might hit 10,000 by year end?

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (12)
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (8)
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (7)
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (7)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (7)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (7)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (7)
Watchmen by Alan Moore (7)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (7)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (6)
The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett (6)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (6)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (6)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (6)
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (6)
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (6)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (6)

- Wonder no more, The Book Thief is now in double-digits!
- Stephenie Meyer and Neil Gaiman are our repeat readers in the lists for the second month in a row!
- The group read for Middlesex brought us a new entry into the list (okay, there are more, but I was involved in it, so I'm highlighting it!).
- I've noticed all those glowing reviews in other 999 lists for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo seem to be having the intended peer pressure effect since it's now in the top 17!

Keep tagging!

Great work again stephmo. Thanks for the stats they make interesting reading. I only have one of those books in my own challenge and another one of which I'd read previously.

Thanks Stephmo - I love your recaps!

This is so fun! I, too, participated in the group read of Middlesex, so I was happy to see it make the list.

nice, Steph

2 are in my 999
3 were in my 888, all of which I liked or loved
1 got bumped from both my 888 and 999 ... poor Mrs. Dalloway!

Interesting, at the time we got the Middlesex group read going, a search of the 999 Challenge Group showed 15 of us with it on our lists ... think of the commonalities we'd uncover if everyone tagged :)

I have 5 out of this latest batch.

There seems to be something up - either we lost a lot of tags to collections or there's something wonky in the servers. Because I'm only showing 4,241 uses of the tag this month!

And that Brings us to a Top 10 List because the top books have 6 uses...

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (6)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (6)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (6)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (5)
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (5)
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (5)
Watchmen by Alan Moore (5)
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (5)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (5)
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (5)

I don't know how I feel about this - I think I'm going to post this in Bug Collectors. I just don't think we lost the Middlesex tags and that Neil Gaiman suddenly fell off the list so fast...

the sudden change is really surprising. I wonder if folks who finished started taking off their tags? Just for the heck of it, I looked on the work page for Middlesex with numbers and all tags both on - it identifies only 1 "999 challenge" tag. Still strange though...

I tried to load all tags for Middlesex but it crashed my browser. fwiw: my copy is still tagged 999 Challenge and I haven't done much with Collections.

See, I'm still tagging Middlesex 999 challenge as well. And I went through about 20 people on the 999 list looking for folks with a 999 collection - and I didn't see anything. I realize that it's hunting for a needle in a haystack, but losing 2000 tags is a lot and one would think that I would have found at least 1 collection.

Not to mention - all of these people would have made the collection and immediately dropped all tags on top of everything else. I've noticed quite a few people still use the tags and collections. Not everyone is getting rid of them. Much as I'd love to say challenge groups are super-awesome LT users, I'm going to guess we're just like the general population of LT when it comes to collections. Sometimes we leave the old tag, sometimes we take it away.

ETA - Awesome call-out on Middlesex - I just added to the bug thread - http://www.librarything.com/topic/70183 - and went through the posters here and in our Book One Group read to see who still had it tagged in their library. I found 5 of the 7 tags from last month (at least) just from that. Sweet!

Did we tag different editions of the same title? Would that make a difference? Like if 2 of us tagged the hardcover and another 2 the paperback and someone else the large print edition . . .

BookLizard,
That would mean some cleaning work is needed - combining book-works! ^__^

RE: numbers drop.
Could be free-accounters replacing read books with new ones...

49- I hope people aren't combining different editions of books. I use my library as my catalog and want it to reflect the actual editions of books that I have. If it's a paperback that could be a totally different printing from a BOMC issues, etc. Hope everyone is careful about this.

>51 tututhefirst: Your editions remain unchanged in your catalog - what combining does is connect you to people that own the work. If you search my catalog for From a Buick 8, you can see that I have 2 editions:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=stephmo&deepsearch=from+a+buick...

However, if you look at the stats, you'll see that each book is part of the 2,420 From a Buick 8's owned on LibraryThing. Because between the regular Scribner hardcover edition and the Cemetery Dance Slip-Cover edition, the contents are the same. Just as the Spanish-versions, Italian-versions and French-versions are connected.

well I'm all 'tagged up' ... turns out with the extra category I added midway through the challenge (unavoidable, I joined a book club, sorry) I have 92 books in the 999 challenge and of them 28 yet to read ...
all this talk of book combining and cleaning catalogues sounds very complicated, hope I haven't mucked anything up anywhere along the line with my tags ...

edit - 95 books. forgot to include the group reads

Something got fixed - because we have 7,147 uses of the tag now!

Alright, the little-late top 20 for tags with a cutoff at 7 or more uses of the tag!

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (12)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (10)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (9)
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (9)
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (8)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (8)
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (7)
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (7)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (7)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (7)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (7)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (7)
Watchmen by Alan Moore (7)
The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett (7)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (7)

We should welcome Jeffrey Eugenides to the double-digit club! He joins the ever-present Markus Zusak with The Book Thief that will probably remain the #1 read book in the 999 challenge this year (I admit it, it's going to be in my challenge as well - and I'd planned that since January, I promise!).

Stephenie Meyer continues her reign as the only author to consistently be the only author in the top-whatever to have multiple spots held. The Twilight-haters can hate all they want, but these are popular. (Am I the only one that appreciated the popcorn ways of that series but couldn't take The Host, by the by?)

This is not to say that we're not a sophisticated group - Peter Boxtail would be rather proud. As a group, we're knocking six books off of his list with Middlesex, Atonement, Mrs Dalloway, The Brothers Karamazov, Watchmen and Middlemarch.

By the by - at nearly 7500 tags, I say we are on target for 10,000 by the end of the year!

Thanks Stephmo!

Thanks for the hard work again stephmo. I'm now down to none of the popular titles in my challenge.

Let's see, I have 1, 3, 5, and 9.

The search is this: http://www.librarything.com/tag/999+challenge

I just didn't go out to the tags listed 5 times because that would be a top 24 and it didn't flow as well. Oh, and I'm slightly lazy. =P

So I'm sure plenty of people's titles are there when you expand the list!

I haven't forgotten the monthly tradition - it just appears that tag search is stuck again. The results are almost the same as they were on August 11th (actually, they're 7,117 now!). So I think we may have the issue we had last month.

I've added to the bug collector thread to see if we can get a nudge like we did last time.

I've been bumping the bug collector thread for a few months - and I still think there's something wrong with the counts (it says 7,050 uses of the tag now), but I noticed that tag watched moved today.

So I've checked the tags for 999 Challenge one last time - and there were some changes - a final look back and a TOP 20:

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (12)
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (9)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (9)
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (9)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (8)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (8)
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (7)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (7)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (7)
Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin (7)
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (6)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (6)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (6)
Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (6)
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (6)
New Moon by Stephenie Meyer (6)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (6)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (6)
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (6)
Julie and Julia by Julie Powell (6)

Quite a few dark-horse entries! But the usual suspects are still there and Markus Zusak maintained his superiority all the way to the end. Neil Gaiman and Fyodor Dostoevsky were the only other entrants with more than one book for a while, but only Ms. Meyer managed that feat with her entire Twilight series...and only Fyodor managed to stay on the list!

Clearly, we like a little bit of everything. :)

Thanks for putting that together stephmo!

Yeah, thanks stephmo. Made interesting reading all through the year. Only 1 of my own challenge books made the final list, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.