Banned Books and Library Thing

cherry_chiicake reminds me that this is Banned Books Week, something I had completely and entirely forgotten. I now mean to find out whether any of my local libraries have events planned, and if it isn't too late to participate.

By a curious coincidence, I just created a Library Thing account at the very beginning of the week. Yes, I already have a Bibliophil page; shut up, Library Thing is better. The site in general just seems a lot cleaner and less haphazard, and it seems easier to get recommendations of similar books from other users. It's also easier to get different editions of books, from places other than Amazon, and you can change the cover to the one on your actual edition--if they don't have one you can upload your own picture, something Bibliophil doesn't even try to do, which always really bugged me. Also I am always sure how to pronounce "Library Thing"--Bibliophil I always want to say "biblio-fill", and while that is a real word, it just sounds dumb to me in English.

The only real advantage I see in Bibliophil is that it's always free, and Library Thing has a fee if you want to enter more than 200 books. I see this as an opportunity to treat them differently, though. Bibliophil I just used as a straight catalog, listing every book I have at all. Library Thing I think I'm going to use more in depth, examining other users' libraries for books I would like, and entering only the books I actually care enough about to rate and review, so that it will be a long time before I ever approach 200. I've only entered six books so far, and I've reviewed one, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which only had one other tiny review. And I'm not just giving these one-line "Great book, well written. A+ would read again" jobs. We're talking two-to-three paragraph assessments. I should be getting to the rest soon, and only then will I be adding more. My user name is Branduno, of course. It's a lot of fun so far! I highly recommend it.

Anyway! Books! Go read Maurice Sendak, Alvin Schwartz, and Roald Dahl.