QUESTIONS for the AVID READER Part I

Welcome to the 2023 edition of Questions for the Avid Reader!

I'm SassyLassy and this year I'm trying to follow on from avaland's great discussions last year.

If you're new to Club Read, this thread is where a question is posed on a roughly week to ten day schedule, and then you jump in. Don't just give a direct answer; embellish it if you have the time with what you think, and then others will respond.

As usual, if you have any questions you would like asked, send me a message and I'll put them out there.

Image from New York Magazine

QUESTION 1 New Year, New Broom

Here goes. 2022 reading, and goals for 2023 were covered at the end of 2022. One of the flip sides of new books is purging old books. The experts tell us to start slowly, so here goes.

Quick - don't think about this. Just go to your shelves/ tables/ floors and pick five books you would clean out. Textbooks and travel guides don't count - they're too easy. If you're ambitious pick ten.

How did they get there in the first place? Tell us about them.

Of course this being Club Read, there had to be a new book attached - it couldn't be that easy after all. Here is a book I found while looking for images:

This was an easy question for me as I have recently dumped a clutch of books into my recycling box. They are books I have read of course, because I could not think of discarding unread books from my shelves as they just might prove to be that marvellous reading experience we all look for. They are books that I would not wish to read again and in some cases i regret reading them in the first place. Here they are and where they came from:

Roger Zelazny - Lord of light
This is one of the masterwork science fiction books that I am reading in chronological order (published 1967). As it was part of a reading plan I brought it through the internet. (I live in France and so have no easy access to an English bookshop) I bought it in the summer last year and read it in July 2022. It was a book I could not get into https://www.librarything.com/work/20886/details/220790707

Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
When I start reading I rarely do not finish a book, but this one was one of the exceptions. I just got very bored and got to page 361 (there are over 600 pages) before tossing it aside.
The book was bought in England for 95p at a British red cross charity shop, probably in Matlock Derbyshire. It would have been purchased sometime before 2005. As it was published in 2001 it would have taken perhaps a couple of years to find its way to a charity shop.

John Buchan - The Greenmantle
This is a Wordsworth Classics edition and so a cheap purchase. I have no idea where it came from but it was published in 1994. It had probably been on my shelves for 20 odd years.
https://www.librarything.com/work/145081/details/218006667

Peter Carey Illywhacker
Another doorstep of a book from a charity shop costing 79p. Again would have been bought before 2005. I didn't really like this one either
https://www.librarything.com/work/51857/details/230914570

James T Farrell This man and This Woman
This was bought last year in September. Its part of my project to read books published in 1951. It came through Abe books, second hand. It has been written in by someone called Fpisil? dated avril 62 and so probably had ended up in a french bookshop. It was an excellent book, but one I would not choose to read again
https://www.librarything.com/work/5392192/details/226215571

The books that I took off of my many book shelves were not in my Librarything inventory- so I really have to get rid of them.
The Joy of Stress by Peter G. Hanson. Who needs to read about it- just go for a walk, speak to friends and of course read!
The IMAC for Dummies by David Pogue. I got rid of my IMAC years ago- everything in this book is now obsolete!
Books that I liked but don't want to read again I already give to a friend who is a voracious reader. She reads them and then passes them on to other readers.

Q1: New Year, New Broom

What a great way to start off the new year! I always need to divest myself of books; after two years I still have unpacked boxes of books and no more bookshelves. Here's what a quick sweep of a dusty pile brought up:

The Resilient Child: Seven Essential Lessons for Your Child's Happiness and Success by George S. Everly. I received this as an Early Reviewer book in 2008. I found it in desperate need of editing, self-referential and -aggrandizing, and a slog to read. 1.5*

The Highly Intuitive Child by Catherine Crawford. DNF. No idea it's provenance, but it's an advance reading copy.

You Just Don't Understand Me and You're Wearing That? by Deborah Tannen. I don't know where they came from, but I assume it was during my parenting-a-tween phase. Never read them and never intend to, so out they go.

Because I'm the mother, that's why : mostly true confessions of modern motherhood by Stephanie Pierson. Not sure its origins. I called it "Erma Bombeck for New Yorkers," so not terrible. Never something I will revisit or recommend though. 3.5*

Collapse by Jared Diamond. Bought when it was popular, but never read.

The Intimate Ape: Orangutans and the Secret Life of a Vanishing Species by Shawn Thompson. An Early Reviewer book from 2010. Not actually about orangs, but about the author travelling around talking to people who worked with orangs at some point in their lives. I have read many great books through the ER program, but this was not one of them. 2*

Thanks to you, I have cleared seven books from my shelves. Woohoo!

My house is full of too much stuff. The bookshelves are jam packed and it’s hard to even get to them all. I decided last week that I am going to get rid of many of my books because I am now needing the highest strength reading glasses and it’s still hard to read with them. So I can’t really read books anymore just ebooks.

I Know You Like to Smoke, But You Can QuitNow: Stop Smoking in 30 Days - I stopped smoking 26 years ago

Painting on Glass & Ceramic - I don’t even paint

Books about keto

A bunch of craft books.

>7 dianeham: I Know You Like to Smoke, But You Can QuitNow: Stop Smoking in 30 Days - I stopped smoking 35 years ago

Painting on Glass & Ceramic - I don’t even paint

LOL

>7 dianeham: had to correct that to 26 years ago.

>2 SassyLassy:

Q#1

I wrung my hands at this heart-rending question; then I remembered that I have a stack of books to donate either to my local community centre or the library.

About to go out:

Prophètes sans dieu
The journal of a disappointed man & A last diary
The canary murder case
Light verse and satires, Witter Bynner
Chinese translations by Witter Bynner (but maybe not, this needs more thinking)
The wisdom of China and India

Tip o' the iceberg...

>10 LolaWalser: Witter Bynner - I was sure I had read something by him and I have although I had not posted in my library, just put that right.

Journey with Genius: Recollections and reflections concerning D. H. Lawrence

>2 SassyLassy: Question 1
Well. ALL of my books are still in boxes. I do plan to do some purging when I get around to unpacking them. In the meantime, I am relying on Libby and library books for my reading. And my Audible and Kindle libraries.

Currently reading The Thursday Murder Club. This will go back to the library when I finish.
Currently listening to Cat's Eyewitness. This is downloaded from Libby, and back to Libby it will go. Ditto everything else I have currently checked out on Libby.

Let's see... I did purge quite a lot of books before moving. I tossed a number of old computer books. Don't need the Windows 7 and Windows XP any more. I got rid of all the ARCs I had on my shelves. Took them all to the library for someone else to read. I wasn't going to be getting to them any time soon. I've acquired two more since I moved, but I do plan to read them... The Last Party and Hester. I won't keep them when I'm done though. What else? I did a pretty good purge of my cookbooks before I moved. Some were just in bad shape, or were things I wasn't that interested in anymore, and/or had never really used. One criteria was "has it been indexed on EatYourBooks". If not, it was likely to go. Ditto with gardening books. A lot of those were books I had gotten free or cheap from library sales.

And then there were the books that got covered in mud when my root cellar wall collapsed last May. I did actually make a list of all the books I threw out (over 50), but so far I have only replaced one of them and that was The Illuminated Desert. I also got rid of a lot of books that came from library book sales (a bag for $5...) Easy come, easy go.

Q1 New broom

I’m away from home, so I can’t grab books without thought. Maybe I should just do the experiment for the books here, but I’m a bit squeamish about that…

When I discard books in real life, something I do quite regularly now, it tends to be mostly novels that I have in cheap paperback editions and am either very unlikely to reread or can easily replace as ebooks from Gutenberg if I do want to. Useless non-fiction I keep if it has curiosity value or if it’s so completely useless that it isn’t fair to give it to a Little Library (those guidebooks to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, or 1990s computer manuals…). Useful-but-not-to-me nonfiction seems a difficult category to identify, I like to think that most has already gone.

Well the countries come and go, but geography generally stays the same--and those old guidebooks, unlike the 25th Fodor's edition to Las Vegas, actually appreciate with time, as curios. In particular if they are well-illustrated--sometimes there are no other easily available sources of vintage photos of places.

>14 LolaWalser: Possibly: but a lot depends on how old, and also on whether it’s the sort of guidebook that had a lot of history, architecture, and interesting cultural stuff in it. The ones I’m thinking of are from the 70s and don’t have much beyond lists of hotels and restaurants. I have other old guides that are real treasures.

I can't really do this. I gave away close to 2000 books when we moved to Florida 2 years ago. And right now most of the books I kept are packed away in storage for while the condo is staged for sale. I was "allowed" to keep out 30-40 books, but the were all ones I wanted to read "right now," so they are very necessary.

>16 arubabookwoman: I really don't know why home stagers think books are clutter! Thank goodness for ereaders now! Otherwise, I would be a serious book hoarder. It seems like so many of us have had major moves in the last year. I'm half tempted to create a thread just for packing, moving, unpacking.... Ha ha!

Oye. We cleaned out books early this year, and among the 500 or so books were 30(!) that I considered part of my TBR pile. 🙂 So what did i miss, other than some textbooks that i’m second-guessing keeping but which are specifically excluded by the question? Hmm

China Room by Sunjeev Sahota - read last year. Decent but no need to keep (I’m using more ebooks to avoid this problem)

Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo - random library book sale purchase from 2000. I don’t even know who Caputo is.

Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Glass - i picked this up in 2013 in, I think, a curious-about-philosophy phase. Looks like reading it would be work right, a chore. 🙂

One Day the Wind Changed by Tracy Daugherty - a 2011 purchase. No clue what this book is about or like

An Invisible Country by Stephen Wackwitz - a 2012 purchase. Again, no clue what about this book

- but i could still imagine reading the last four, so maybe i’ll keep them after all. ☺️

Thank you Sassy - you sped up my trip to the bookshelves to clean out a few more books!

Three novels by Christian Jacq - if anyone here tells me they love his work I will rescue them... The Empire of Darkness, Nefer the Silent and something else. Bought them at our annual huge bookfair, have owned them over 10 years, and never tempted to pick them up...

Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger - huge book, might be good, but too big to hold and it's been here about 15 years (also book fair)

One L by Scott Turow - read this maybe 30 years ago

The Glory by Herman Wouk - read it many years ago

Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson - a really old copy with small print and the library is sure to have a nicer one, if I ever get round to reading it...

>19 cushlareads: I read The Empire of Darkness years ago and rated it three stars. There was nothing special about it and I am not even sure if I have it anymore (it's not on my shelves, so I either gave it away or it is in a box in the basement...). Of course, that is just my personal opinion and other people may love it!

>20 MissBrangwen: Excellent! It can stay in the box.

Going through my TBR Collection I could remove:

Heart-shaped Box by Joe Hill -- have never really jived with his stories or writing.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin -- Have had it for years, wanted to see what the predecessor of 1984 and Brave new World was like. But I find it insufferably boring.

Notes of a Crocodile by Miaojin Qiu -- No idea what this is about or where it came from or why I have it.

The Trouble with Being Born by E. M. Cioran -- Pessimistic philosophy is shockingly depressing.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver -- has sat on my TBR for over a decade, never once have I thought about picking it up. Kingsolver is one of those authors I think I like if I read her, but none of her stories interest me.

I gave away a file box of books to my high school friend Tony, who then passes them on to his daughters or the homeless shelter. In it were:

Otto of the Silver Hand Childhood book. Loved it when I was 10. Re-read it and decided it needed to be released into the wild.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Good book, but not going to re-read.

Timequake Vonnegut's farewell memoir of sorts. I liked it, but not well enough to dust.

Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Never a big Tolkien fan. "But they're classics!" my husband said. I suggested he read them, then. He pitched them in the box before he got to The Two Towers.

Emma Multiple copies of this. It was my great-grandfather's beat-up copy. So I tore out the fly leaf where he had written his name and tossed it in the box. It might hold together for one more read.

>Question 1.

I can't do it. Sorry. I fall down on the first of the year's question.... Occasionally over the years, I have purged books when the moon is high and wolves are baying, but it can't be forced. Not even the multiple copies I keep around for proselytizing (I sent Lisa a 2nd copy of a JCO Gothic tale recently, and I sent a close friend home the other day with my 2nd copy of Kate Grenville's The Idea of Perfection -- best rom-com ever).

I prefer the books walk out on under their own free will :-)

Question 1

That's... complicated. I occasionally drop a bag of books as a donation to the library but that's usually unplanned. I need to thin my library a bit though so we shall see what I decide to do this year. I am not very good of letting go of books...

Loving these answers - maybe this exercise should be done a couple of times a year. Who knows what we will all have accumulated six months from now?

>4 baswood: After your review of the Chabon, I'm not surprised it's on your list.

>7 dianeham: Good choices

>10 LolaWalser: Heart-Rending indeed, but I know you are made of stern stuff!

>12 WelshBookworm: Had forgotten about computer manuals and cookbooks.

>13 thorold: >14 LolaWalser: There are some wonderful old travel books out there, and I also like old highway maps which can show you what are now great sideroads; those I would keep. The kind I was thinking of are those ones with restaurants and clubs that never last more than a few years, and I wouldn't trust them anyway!
Useless non-fiction I keep if it has curiosity value I like that

>16 arubabookwoman: I can't really do this Having your books in stager jail is just not fun, for you or the books.

>18 dchaikin: Philip Caputo is actually on my list of favourite authors. He's another dark one.

>19 cushlareads: Thank you You remind me that I have a monster biography of Kissinger somewhere that probably could do with a new home.

>22 stretch: It took a bit to get into We
I was curious, so Google tells me Qui Miaojin was a queer novelist from Hong Kong. She committed suicide at age 26.

>23 nohrt4me2: Wish I was better at parting with books I probably won't reread, but I have a habit of convincing myself that they may come in useful someday, which is probably not the case for a lot of them. How did you wind up with multiple copies of Emma?

>24 avaland: >25 AnnieMod: I'm with both of you. How about just one? That's what the experts tell us!

>23 nohrt4me2: I liked it, but not well enough to dust.

I love this!

>23 nohrt4me2: >28 SassyLassy: That could be the ultimate test!

Q1 - Most of my books are still packed away in boxes, but I can get rid of some that I've recently read and won't read again:

Running Down a Dream by Candy Palmater, which I accidentally ordered 2 copies

and

Shiver, Allie Reynolds

So that's 3

>27 labfs39: Nah, that does not work either... Put it in a box, stack the boxes... then you just dust the top of the boxes once in awhile....

I had to sell my very first library during a very miserable winter once. It may have been just ~100 books but it was what I really wanted and was reading at the time. A few months later, I actually bought again the books I had to part with and they became the backbone of my Bulgarian library (most of them and most of the ones that joined them in the next years were gifted to a friend when I moved a few years later but that's a different story - my mother would have killed me if I tried to store all of them back home). But that whole thing made me very unwilling to part with books... I am slowly trying to learn to let go - especially books I know I won't read again. We shall see. If I manage to buy less books than I get rid of this year, it will be a success... Slim chance but you never know.

>31 labfs39: That sounds incredibly painful, Annie. Once when I was studying abroad, the basement where I was storing my books flooded, and I lost so many. I made a list of the ones that couldn't be saved (if I had been thinking, I would have ripped out the title page, but even damaged, I hated the idea of desecrating them further), with the intent of replacing them, but as a grad student I didn't have the money, and more importantly, at that point I knew what every book looked like, and I even remembered the layout of pages. To replace them with a different edition would have seem wrong. I have moved several times since then, but every time I have been super aware of the storage conditions wherever my books were. When I moved to Florida, most of my books had to go into storage, so I paid for climate control. When Hurricane Michael hit, I worried about water damage, but fortunately the eye wall passed a few miles from us, and it was spared.

>26 SassyLassy: alright, Caputo stays. :)

>30 AnnieMod: >31 labfs39: I was very attached to my specific physical books, not just the content, for a long time. And then a switch flicked, and I wasn't, which was weird. Now they all feel replaceable. Anyway, I would have been crushed 20 yrs ago if I lost all my books. That's really sad.

>32 dchaikin: >31 labfs39:

The only good news in the situation was that the ones I bought to replace the ones I had to sell were the same editions - not too many editions of the same book in Bulgarian, especially for science fiction. :) The biggest problem was that because of the small printing runs for the newer ones (500 copies was considered a big printing run in those days) and the age of others, a lot of them were out of print so I had to go second hand. For all I know, some of the books were actually my old books (even though I know I did not buy any of them directly but books tend to move around).

The gift when I moved? It was my choice so I may have occasionally wished I did not lose these books, I am ok with that. I may have overcompensated a bit when I moved though.

Some days I wish I can start over with my library here (not LT - the physical part of it). But then I look around and I decide I am fine. Except for the lack of space. :)

>2 SassyLassy: augh did not see this thread start! Give me a moment, Ill get there!

I have given away about twenty unread books during the last three months or so, but there are still some to find as I slowly make my way through my shelves trying to make my huge tbr a little smaller.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux - I have not read it so far and I have realized that I am just not interested in this kind of travel writing anymore.

The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux - same reason as above, I DNFed this because it couldn't hold my interest and I worked out that I am just not interested in the author's opinions.

Songlines by Bruce Chatwin - similar to above. I would rather read an own voices book about Indigenous Australians.

The Teahouse on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens - I bought this years ago thinking it would be similar to Maeve Binchy and have not read it. Upon a closer look, the main character is a woman trying to coerce her partner into having children, and I have no interest in this topic, nor is it my kind of humor.

Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer - this was a cover buy a few years ago, I had never heard of the author and bought the German translation in my local bookshop. I think I was having a bad day and wanted to cheer myself up. The beautiful cover featuring a ship similar to the Titanic appealed. However, I am not actually interested in the story and after reading through LT reviews I don't think that I would enjoy it.

There is a book swap bookshelf in the entrance area of one of the local supermarkets and I usually take my books there, and often they are gone the next time I visit, which makes me happy!

>26 SassyLassy: Obviously, I don't have all the books I've ever bought, or read, or got through other means.... I must have the capacity of 'letting go" but it's like a once in a decade snowstorm.

>35 MissBrangwen: don’t read Chatwin for the ethics…by which i mean both the issue of his Euro-centric take and that his novels are misleading and really mostly fiction… but he was a special voice. Songlines is a book close to my heart.

But if that’s voice is ugly to you right now, then definitely put aside.

>37 dchaikin: I understand! I think it is not a book for me, but I acknowledge that it is special to a lot of readers, especially if they have a history with it. Thank you for your comment!

>35 MissBrangwen: I stopped reading Theroux After African safari and could even finish it. Great travel writer back in the day, noe he's just a cranky old man

>37 dchaikin: Poor Dan. You threw away his favourite book. Just joking.

>1 SassyLassy: I usually go through my books shelves every couple of years or so. and happily give away or trade books that I don't remember having, books that I didn't care for that much, or books given to me as gifts that were just ....not all that great. Anything to make room for the new shiny covers I got over the holidays. However I do have a box of books in my car that needs to go to good will and Im sure there are 5 that might fit the bill here. Stay tuned

>17 WelshBookworm: when we were selling our house the real estate lady said the books needed to be packed away and the hand made shelves removed. we looked at each other and said 'no', and got ourselves another agent and the house sold in a week....

>42 cindydavid4: Good for you!

This question is part of a major project for me...but I can't do it. The problem is that the books I want to get rid of I haven't read (haven't even tried to read, yet), and I just can't dump those. I do have one I'm getting rid of...kind of. His Child or Hers?, an excellent fluffy romance; pulled it out of a box, checked on LT to see if I'd read it, yes I had, just glance at the beginning...a couple hours later I had finished it, and gotten an ebook copy of that book and another by the author. The paper book is going away, I have a lot more room for ebooks.

Hmm. I could probably get rid of some of the Early Reviewer books I got in the first couple years of the program, that I have never read and probably never will. Can I Wear My Nose Ring to the Interview, for one - I'd have to look at my list for some of the others. Nowadays I mostly get ebooks (the only paper book I requested in the last 3-4 years never came), but in the beginning it was all paper books. I'd have to _find_ them, of course (looks over my shoulder at 50+ boxes of books...semi-cataloged on LT, but still).

>42 cindydavid4: Speaking of real estate agents not doing themselves any favours, years ago when we were looking at houses we saw a very nice one but it had no wall space. I asked the agent "where do we put books?" and she turned to me and said "oh you don't need many books". It's turned into one of those 20 year old family jokes. Doesn't matter how many shelves I have, there will be squishing and a bit of double stacking.

>35 MissBrangwen: I think I have Pillars of Hercules here in hardback, from my parents' house, and I am not going to read it either.

This thread is good for me - I'm off to pull another 5 books off the shelves before dinner.

>44 cushlareads: I think I have Pillars of Hercules here in hardback

actually that was one of his better ones, but doubt Id reread it in case it was me not picking up on the crankiness and hes been that way all along...

>40 baswood: Sadly about true. 🙂 But I’m certainly ok if Mirjam or anyone else doesn’t want to read it or doesn’t like it.

I should be able to answer this question. I no doubt have plenty of books that are probably not really worth keeping around, if I'm honest. But I can't do it. I'm too much of a book-hoarder. Hey, at least I can admit it, right?

Oh, no, wait! I just remembered. I have this copy of Friends and Traitors by John Lawton that I got sent by accident when I ordered something else. I was told to just keep it instead of sending it back, but it doesn't look like anything I'm particularly interested in, especially as it is apparently book 8 in a series. There. I'll ditch that one. I was planning on donating it to the library, anyway.

Question 1 Clearing out books

I'm kind of an outlier, so I had decided not to answer but hey, why not? Any book I can put my hand on is a candidate for clearing out, as soon as it's read. All the books I've read while here in Istanbul are in a box waiting to be donated to a local used bookstore. I probably have 1 1/2 boxes of books to read that can then be chucked out, but I won't get to them all while we're here so they'll have to go to Germany with me (probably, I might thin the ranks to 1 box even if I haven't read them).

The only ones that are definitely being kept are art reference books for me, guitar learning books for Morgan, and a couple of sentimental books of his.

I cleaned out a lot of books when I moved in 2021, and as I get new bookshelves in my new home, I'm going to purge a lot more. One thing that makes it super easy is to ask myself if I'm realistically ever going to read or reread a book, and if the answer is "yes," then I consider how easy it would be to find the book at the library or a used bookstore. I can get rid of most books if I stick to this. Realistically I'm never going to get to all those books, so I need to free them up for other readers. This also gives me a nicely curated collection of nice editions and special books.

>31 labfs39: That's awful. It's happened to me twice. The first time the books were recoverable, but I can recognize them right away as they all have a thin discoloured line along the bottom (all paperbacks). The second time I didn't know about the flood which was about 10cm, and some of my most treasured books, some from the beginning of the last century, had to go. Many tears were shed, as they are irreplaceable for their associations.

>44 cushlareads: Did you manage it?

>48 ursula: Glad you did chime in. It's good to hear from the 'outliers'.

>12 WelshBookworm: Still thinking about cookbooks. Some are great records of social history, especially some of those old ones put together by community groups, in the cook's own handwriting, and sometimes with illustrations.

I've mentioned this before, but I used to have a Newfoundland cookbook, now sadly lost. The recipe for flipper pie started "Go up on deck and club a seal". I've never forgotten that!

Well I started this exercise for myself. Yesterday I proudly took a duplicate copy of The Corpse Walker to a friend, knowing she would like it. However, she gave me two books in return. Does that mean I have to get rid of six?

I decided a duplicate copy of Moby Dick could go, as it lacks any supplementary material.

Spurred on by >19 cushlareads:'s example, I decided I can get rid of my enormous biography of Kissinger, a book I had only been holding on to because it was a present, but I'm sure that person will understand.

A book I read this summer and enjoyed as a summer read, but will not read again, An Audience of Chairs will go to a local little free library, as it is a local book and someone will enjoy it.

Similarly Donna Morrissey's Kit's Law; I enjoy reading her books, but only need to keep a few.

Stretching for book #6 here, but decided on The N'Gustro Affair, by Jean-Patrick Manchette, which I'm finding downright offensive. The only problem there is what to do with it, as it is so appalling. I have liked others of his books, so was surprised by this one.

That's six, so I managed.

Sort of supplementary question:

How do you account for your clear outs in LT: "decommissioned', 'read but unowned', your own shorthand?

>52 SassyLassy: I use "Read but unowned - passed on" for the books I occasionally give away to the little free library for example, and "Great 2018 Cull" for the 64 books I got rid off when I moved in 2018.

My problem is that most of the books I'd be happy to lose were presents and so I can't see myself removing them from the shelves.

>52 SassyLassy: Read but Unowned collection with a tag of “given away” to differentiate from other reasons for the book being in that collection (library, other borrowing programs and so on).

>52 SassyLassy: I have a "Released and Withdrawn" collection that I will move them into, and a similar tag. Plus I put the reason(s) for letting the book go into the private comments field.

>52 SassyLassy: I have Read but Unowned which contains both books from the library or other borrows, and books I owned when I read them but have since gotten rid of. I also have a Discarded collection, which I created when I bought the same book for the _third_ time at our local library sale (possibly the same physical book, even) - it had a great blurb but was very badly written. Before that I deleted books I'd gotten rid of, but that made me decide I needed to track all the books I'd had (I suppose if I'd kept them and tracked them in Read it would have been enough...but I wanted to mark the books I'd gotten rid of). I also have a Discard collection, for books I've decided can go but I haven't physically removed them from my house...things can get complicated.

discarded collection, currently 1629 books: https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=dchaikin&collectionname=discar...

I use the collection Read but Unowned for library and other borrowed books, and Previously Owned for those I've gotten rid of in some way for any of a number of reasons.

>50 SassyLassy: The recipe for flipper pie - Reminds me of the Welsh cookbook First catch your peacock!

>59 WelshBookworm: Hahaha!

Ok ready to answer the question:

paul mccartney: a life bought for my sis for her birthday Said she didn't have time to read it and let me read it first. The beginning about his early life and friendship with the others; then the author gets bogged down in so many specific details of concerts, trips, etc that it was just too much. I asked sis if she wanted it back; said no, so thats one tome gone

Tiff: the life of Timothy Findley discovered this canadian author years back when pilgrim was selected for an online reading group, and was totally hooked. Have read most of his work, and a few years ago was eager to read this bio. Got it from secret santa and started reading it; Kept getting distracted by other books and finally decided to just trade it in.

the other bennett sister So Ive read Pride and Prometheus and Mary B, both about Mary bennett and enjoyed both. Saw this one and thought I might like it, but didn't really, and didn't finish

The City of Brass a fantasy about jinns,flying carpets and worlds didn't keep me reading at all, so this tome went bye bye

trying to decide on #5

>52 SassyLassy: I decided to use a shot of heavy-duty language pain to mitigate the book-separation pain, so I call mine “Deaccessioned books”. I keep “read but unowned” for books that were never part of my library.

A few weeks ago, thorold was speaking of a newish feature in Charts and Graphs: Pages. Time to have a look. I've included how to find this feature in case you haven't seen it.



image from pixabay

QUESTION 2: Pages

If you go to your LT Home Page, you will see in the second header row 'Charts and Graphs'. Select this.

In Overview in the left hand column, you will see a heading 'Books', then a subheading 'Pages'. Select this.

You will see the following:
Top Authors by Pages
Top Series by Pages
Top Tags by Pages
Top Genres by Pages

Who or what are your top five in each category?
Were there any surprises?
Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?

Just for fun, What is longest book?

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?

QUESTION 2: Pages

I'll start with the last question: No, I don't feel this is an accurate representation of my reading or even of my books from the last twenty years, because it is dominated by series and authors of series that I no longer read. I'll mark these dormant items with BFTP (Blast from the past):

Authors:
Diana Gabaldon
Suzanne Brockmann - BFTP
Terry Goodkind - BFTP
Terry Brooks - BFTP
Mercedes Lackey - BFTP

Top non-series authors (gotta love those 19th century tome writers):
Charles Dickens
Leo Tolstoy
Connie Willis
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Victor Hugo

Series:
Outlander
Sword of Truth (pub order) - BFTP
Sword of Truth (chronological order) - BFTP
Shannara - BFTP
Shannara Universe - BFTP

Tags (no surprises here):
Fiction
Nonfiction
Memoir
WWII
History

Genres (or here):
General Fiction
General Nonfiction
History
Historical Fiction
Biography & Memoir

Longest Book: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare at 2,364 p.

Q2: Pages

So I decided to run this twice, because the results are going to change depending on what collections happen to be selected. First I ran it on All Books, and then I used my Read collection. I would say my results are an...accurate-ish representation for the books I have cataloged on LT, but potentially skewed by ratty and/or missing data since I haven't been paying scrupulous attention to the pages fields. And they are an incomplete picture of my reading as a whole, since I rarely record the books I've borrowed on this LT account.

Authors (All Books)
Mercedes Lackey
Tamora Pierce
Brian Jacques
Brandon Sanderson
Terry Pratchett

Authors (Read)
Tamora Pierce
Brandon Sanderson
Brian Jacques
Yoshiki Nakamura
Lois McMaster Bujold

No real surprises here, in either grouping. Haven't read much by Lackey or Pierce lately, but I know I have in the past. I obviously have a lot of Pratchett, but most of it is still waiting to be read.

Series (All Books)
Discworld
Redwall: Publication Order
Tortall Universe
Redwall: Chronological Order
Skip Beat!

Series (Read)
Skip Beat!
Eyeshield 21
Tortall Universe
Redwall: Chronological Order
Redwall: Publication Order

Again, no real surprises here. Well, except for the positioning of the two Redwall series. Those should (in theory) have the same number of pages, but apparently they do not. Something to examine on the series page end of things.

Tags (All Books)
fantasy
unread
TBR
manga - English
young adult

Tags (Read)
fantasy
manga - English
Viz
young adult
shojo

Yeah, no real surprises here. Wanting to maybe change up my tagging conventions, but that's a project for a different day.

Genres (All Books)
Fantasy
Teen
Graphic Novels & Comics
Young Adult
Kids

Genres (Read)
Graphic Novels & Comics
Fantasy
Teen
Tween
Kids

The demographic genres (teen/tween/kids/young adult) make this set of stats less useful/interesting to me. Also, I'm not sure how well the genres have been applied to the works in my library in terms of accuracy and consistency and completeness. That said, I'm not at all surprised to see Fantasy and Graphic Novels/Comics heading up these lists.

Longest Book (All Books): The Complete Works of Shakespeare - 3,436 pages (apparently)
Longest Book (Read): The Count of Monte Cristo - 1,312 pages

Q2

Interesting feature, I hadn't discovered that before!

Top Authors by Pages
J.R.R. Tolkien
Rebecca Gablé
Agatha Christie
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Diana Gabaldon

Top Series by Pages
Waringham Cycle (a series of historical fiction by German author Rebecca Gablé)
Outlander
Hercule Poirot
The Australians (this one is not that relevant to me, but it has twelve books in total, so no surprise)
Middle-earth (that is not even really a proper series, but ok)

Top Tags by Pages
catalogued (I use this for books that have the correct cover, tags and data, at least the data that is important to me)
read
to read
previously catalogued (books I want to go through again to change some of the tags etc)
screen version (books that have been adapted to film and I own the DVD/bluray or have watched it on Netflix - this is surprising, but it is probably a lot of Tolkien and classics, so maybe not that surprising after all)

Top Genres by Pages
General fiction
Fantasy
Historical Fiction
General nonfiction
Travel

In some aspects this is a good representation of my reading because all of the five authors are favorites of mine. On the other hand, I haven't read a lot of fantasy and historical fiction in the last five years or so, and some genres and series are underrepresented. One reason may be that my catalogue is not up to date and I yet have to enter many books that are on my shelves.

Longest book: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2624pp.)

>65 MissBrangwen: Wow, that's a lot of Goethe!

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is my longest book too. I didn't actually read all of it, but definitely enough!

>66 Nickelini: I only read parts of it, too, but I still hope to read all of it one day!

Q1: Coming in late: I basically only get rid of books one at a time when I need to make space on a crowded shelf for a new book. It will be a book I've already read and my wife has either already read it too or expresses no interest in ever reading it. (We always check with each other before removing books from the house.) I am just about always sad about this, though. I love having a home library that is a combination of books available to be read and books already read. But I will get rid of a book right away and without sadness if I read it and don't like it. Also, I am much less sentimental about releasing books that I only read because they were selections for my monthly reading group.

I don't use "collections" much, but I have a tag for such books: "released." However, I've been woefully slow on making sure all released books have a "released" tag.

I'll be back with answers for Q2 later in the day.

My Read collection:

Top Authors by Pages
- Robert Jordan
- William Shakespeare
- Terry Pratchett
- Cormac McCarthy
- JK Rowling

Top Series by Pages
- Wheel of Time
- Discworld
- Harry Potter
- The Divine Comedy
- Barefoot Gen

Top Tags by Pages
- Read
- correct cover - oops, can’t easily display an “at” symbol
- DHC (my initials)
- Fiction
- American Author

Top Genres by Pages
- General Fiction
- General Nonfiction
- History
- Historical Fiction
- Fantasy

Q2

BTW - I get different results when I view this on my desktop computer than on my phone. There is a lot of info missing on the phone version.

Top Authors by Pages no surprises here:
1. Jane Austen
2. Virginia Woolf
3. Margaret Atwood
4. Charles Dickens
5. Ian McEwan

Top Series by Pages I don't read series very often, as shown here:
Rick Steves - this is not a series!
1. Jane Austen Annotated by David M Shepard
Lord of the Rings - this is an error because I entered this book instead of just the first one, which is the only one I'm going to read
2. Puzzles in Classic Fiction - several books, but not all that many pages
3. Bridget Jones
4. Jackson Brodie
5. The Austen Project - I've read 3 of the 4 books. Not much of a series

Top Tags by Pages:
1. BritLit
2. 1001
3. Non-fiction (silly tag, but I started it in the beginning and now it's too late to stop)
4. 20th century
5. Guardian 1000

Top Genres by Pages
1. General fiction
2. General non-fiction
3. Historical fiction
4. Biography & memoir
5. History

Were there any surprises?: No

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)? I'm pretty close to done with reading any Ian McEwan I want to read and I don't think of him very often

Just for fun, What is longest book?:

Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism (2,624 pages)

>70 Nickelini: Click on the graphics to open the list on the phone - the graphic itself is missing some of the top of the list (#2 for me in each graphic) even if it is there in tube table. I am about to open a bug report for that. :)

Q2: Charts and Graphs!

Top Authors by Pages
Philip Roth
Joseph Conrad
Philip Kerr
Jasper Fforde
Greg Iles

Nobody who's followed my threads at all over the years will be surprised by my top two. Roth (9,620) and Conrad (9,595) are in fact neck and neck. Philip Kerr is the author of the wonderful Bernie Gunther Berlin Noir crime series. I've been reading through the series gradually and have purchased several of the later books to have on hand when I'm ready for them. I'm not surprised that Jasper Fforde is near the top of my list, but Greg Iles' appearance has mainly to do with the length of his doorstopper mysteries. I don't even have that many of them on hand.

Top Series by Pages
Bernie Gunther (see above)
Penn Cage (see above: this is the Greg Iles series)
Travis McGee (love these books and have a bunch of them, but they're short)
Zuckerman Bound (This is a Philip Roth trilogy. I have a hardcover and a paperback of each.)
Strangers and Brothers (I've been very much enjoying C.P. Snow's series about life among the middle and upper classes in England during the 20th Century)

Top Tags by Pages (no surprises)
novel
history
first edition
american history
short stories

Top Genres by Pages (no surprises)
general fiction
history
general nonfiction
biography & memoir
mystery

My longest book is The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz by Barry Dean Kernfeld. (1,390 pages)

>72 rocketjk: Ha! Greg Iles appears on my list as well for exactly the same reason.

Q2

Top Authors by Pages:
1. Terry Pratchett
2. J.K. Rowling
3. Shelby Foote
4. R.L. Stine
5. Kim Stanley Robinson

Not shocked by these names. They are either very long books or have 20+ of them.

Top Series by Pages:
1. Discworld
2. Harry Potter
3. Goosebumps
4. The Civil War: A Narrative
5. Morris Theodore Roosevelt- I've only read one of these behemoths.

Top Tags by Pages:
1. History
2. Science
3. Horror
4. Fantasy
5. Humor

Top Genres by Pages
1. General fiction
2. General non-fiction
3. History
4. Science & Nature
5. Horror

Were there any surprises?: Not really, figured these would be the top results.

Just for fun, What is longest book?: Darwin: The Indelible Stamp

Question 2

Top Authors by Pages
1. Agatha Christie - this makes sense, as in 2017 and 2018 I made a project of reading every book she ever wrote, including her autobiographical account of life on an archaeological dig.
2. Jim Butcher - I read The Dresden Files for years until I grew out of love with them, so that tracks.
3. Tamora Pierce - I haven't read her in a while, but still not completely shocking. I read the Becca Cooper series within the last five or so years, I think, and they were longish, for the genre.
4. Louise Penny - not surprising at all, given how many Inspector Gamache novels I've read.
5. Douglas Preston - now that one is a surprise. I don't think I've read anything by him in a good long while.

Top Series by Pages
1. Hercule Poirot - no surprises there!
2. The Dresden Files - or there
3. Doctor Who non tv - I wouldn't consider this an actual series, since I think it just groups all of the tie-in novels. But I have read my fair share of those, so *shrugs*
4. Chief Inspector Gamache - another as expected
5. Pendergast - seriously, I don't think I've read a single one of these since high school. What a blast from the past!

Top Tags by Pages
I fudged these a little, because I tag fiction/nonfiction, century, and decade, and those are less interesting. I went with the top 5 tags other than those.
1. Mystery - not surprising at all
2. Contemporary fantasy - also not shocking
3. Crime fiction - makes sense
4. Whodunnit - also makes sense. would probably be higher on the list if I were more consistent at tagging, tbh
5. Detective fiction - also makes sense. would probably be higher on the list if I were more consistent at tagging, tbh

Top Genres by Pages
1. Mystery - as expected
2. Fantasy - also as expected
3. Teen - this is not a genre. It's a demographic and marketing category which consists of many genres. but whatever
4. General Fiction - I didn't realize I read so much general fiction. I tend to be more of a genre person
5. Horror - I've been getting into horror recently, but I'm surprised I've read enough to make the top five

Were there any surprises?
Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?: Douglas Preston's Pendergast series was a blast from the past. I rarely if ever think about those these days.

Just for fun, What is your longest book?: The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?: I don't think it's an accurate representation of my reading the last few years, but then, going by page count alone wouldn't be. All this says is how many pages of something I've read (and tracked) ever, so it's not an accurate snapshot of my current reading habits. It was still fun to look at though!

>69 dchaikin: How many of the Barefoot Gen volumes did you read? I got through the first three.

well Ill pass on this question since I don't really categorize my books here

>76 labfs39: all ten 🙂 But of course the 1st three are far more powerful than the rest (whose is not a criticism).

>62 SassyLassy:

Top Authors by Pages
Shakespeare
Proust
Dickens
S. King
Atwood

Top Series by Pages
The Dark Tower
A Dance to the Music of Time
Calvin and Hobbs
The Story of the Stone
Pilgrimage
(I guess In Search of Lost Time isn't a series, just one looooooong book).

Top Tags by Pages
own
1001
downsize
non-fiction
The Novel 100
(Fiction is the default -- 526,161 of 618,884 pages -- so I don't have a tag for it).

Top Genres by Pages
General Fiction
Historical Fiction
Mystery
Science Fiction
General Nonfiction
(LT has a very different definition of Historical fiction than I do).

Were there any surprises?
I hadn't realized how much Atwood I've read over the years. Also, see parenthetical notes above.

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?
I hadn't forgotten about S. King, but I stopped reading his work long ago.

Just for fun, What is longest book?
The Riverside Shakespeare

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?
I don't think LT represents genres correctly, but other than that sure.

>79 ELiz_M: I love that Calvin & Hobbes is on your list

>79 ELiz_M: I agree that LT does something funky with genres. Sometimes I have to scratch my head in wonderment at how they classify something. Like the memoir War Brothers or The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore as horror; and To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis as romance.

>62 SassyLassy:

Q2

Pages, huh? This won't be real because of the lacking data in my catalogue--I added thousands of items "manually" and page count is definitely something I skip. But, fwiw:

Top authors

Virginia Woolf
Terry Pratchett
Stephen Jay Gould
Emile Zola
Charles Dickens

Top series

Discworld
Thames & Hudson World of Art
Rougon-Macquart
Fontana Modern Masters
Lord Peter Wimsey

Top tags (this is visible on Profiles too)

French literature
poetry
sf
German literature
art

I opted out of genre but this looks similar, top DCC categories

Literature
the arts
history & geography
Social sciences
Natural sciences & mathematics

Longest book--Three kingdoms at 2340 pages (but mine is a set of 4 volumes)

It's a little off as a snapshot of my library. Do I really have so much more Gould than, say, Shakespeare--of course not, but although I have at least three full sets of Shakespeare, two of those are entered as sets with no page counts. Same goes for Dostoevsky and probably others...

Top Authors by Pages
Mercedes Lackey
David Weber
Andre Norton
Anne McCaffrey
Eric Flint

This includes a bunch of anthologies edited/world created by (especially Lackey, Weber, and Flint), so it's not quite accurate - but not bad.

Top Series by Pages
Valdemar (pub and chron) (Lackey)
Honor Harrington Universe (Weber)
Vorkosigan (pub and chron) (Bujold, who's 8th author by pages)
Assiti Shards (Flint)
Star Trek

Vastly trimmed and collated, because of duplicates - Vorkosigan is fourth and fifth, for instance. And pretty similar to my top authors.

Top Tags by Pages
_fic (unsurprisingly)
SF (Fantasy and science fiction - also not surprising)
__scanned (I've scanned the book cover but have not yet cleaned it up and put it on LT, sheesh)
!dunno (I don't remember where I got this)
__check_cover (I don't know if this book has a suitably good and high-quality cover - some do, most don't)

More work-I-need-to-do than descriptions of the books themselves...which is pretty accurate.

Top Genres by Pages
Fantasy
Science Fiction
Romance
General Nonfiction
General Fiction

Yeah, that's about right.

Were there any surprises?
Not really...though I didn't know I had quite so many Lackey books - nearly 200! Though that does include the anthologies.

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?
Nope. I haven't read anything by McCaffrey in a while, but that's because there isn't anything new (and do not talk to me about Todd or whats-her-name, the daughter. Those are _awful_). But she's still on my shelves, and falls into the category of comfort reads. Ditto Norton. The rest I'm still reading currently.

Just for fun, What is longest book?
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable - also not surprising! 1326 pages.

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?
Of my shelves, yes (though there's still quite a few without any pages entered, especially ebooks). Of my current reading...I need to do this again on my Read collection.

Hmmm. Interestingly similar and different.

Same authors, except Justine Davis replaces Eric Flint, who fell off the list completely - I guess he's a long lost author too (though again, I have his books (anthologies, mostly), I just haven't read them all).

Series
Honor Harrington (Weber)
Valdemar (pub and chron) (Lackey)
(two more variants on Honor)
Liaden Universe (pub and chron) (Lee & Miller - about halfway down the author chart)
Federated Sentient Planets Universe (I don't remember what this is, though I suspect I'll recognize it - just not by this name. Ah, it's McCaffrey - and I wouldn't have considered it one series, it's several overlapping ones)
(another Liaden)
Tortall (Tamora Pierce - 8th in the author list for this set)

Tags
Fic
SF
!dunno
__check_cover
__scanned

Same stuff, different order.

Genres
Fantasy
Romance
SF
Mystery
Teen (and Kids, and YA)
General Nonfiction

Not too different, though Romance and Mystery moved up compared to my full library (Mystery was 6th).

Oh, and the longest book I've read is Storm from the Shadows by Weber - 1104 pages. Not that much shorter than the dictionary...

>62 SassyLassy: Question 2:

Well, this should be interesting.... First of all - I've only used LibraryThing to start cataloging all of my Welsh language books and the books passed on to me from my grandfather and great grandfather's collection of mostly Bibles and theology stuff (they were ministers.) I keep track of the books I've read and want to read on Goodreads.

Top authors:
Pat Clayton
John Milton
D. Simon Evans
Isaac Watts
William Williams

My first thought was who the heck is Pat Clayton? Turns out I have a number of books for Welsh learners (short stories) that he wrote. I have no idea who D. Simon Evans is. I would have to go back and see what the title is. Isaac Watts and William Williams wrote hymns, so I guess I there's a few Welsh hymnals in there...

(Edited to add that D. Simon Evans wrote A Grammar of Middle Welsh. And the William Williams here is NOT the hymn writer, but some other William Williams who wrote a Welsh grammar book, and it seems I am the only LT member that has this book...)

Top series:
Cyfres y dysgwyr
Milton's Paradise (that isn't a series....)
Mediaeval and Modern Welsh series
Gawn ni stori?
Cyfres y Brifysgol a'r Werin

Top tags:
Welsh language materials (not a surprise...)
history
Wales
Welsh language
Middle Welsh

Top genres:
History
Religion and Spirituality
Poetry (must be the Milton....)
Reference
General Nonfiction

Longest book:
Testament newydd...

Now this makes me want to get more of my grandfather's books catalogued. I've only done a very few of them and then got tired of it. But there are some very interesting items. He liked to collect those little miniature Bibles, or collections of the Psalms or whatever. I have no idea if they are worth anything, but they are very cute....

Mine doesn’t make sense. I run it on books read in 2022 and even though I read 14 books by Louise Penny in 2022, she doesn’t show up on the author pages list at all.

It looks like # of pages isn’t included in every catalog record.

>85 dianeham: It depends on the source you used and the format of the books. Ebooks and audiobooks generally don’t have page numbers unless you add them manually for example.

>86 AnnieMod: ah, that explains it then. They are all ebooks. Thanks, Annie, I knew you would know.

Question 2: Pages

Top Authors by Pages
1. Stephen King
2. Marcel Proust
3. Anne Rice
4. Haruki Murakami
5. JK Rowling

Top Series by Pages
1. The Dark Tower
2. Harry Potter
3. Aubrey-Maturin
4. A Song of Ice and Fire
5. Lives of the Mayfair Witches

Top Tags by Pages
1. fiction
2. 20th century
3. 21st century
4. 1001 books
5. non-fiction

Top Genres by Pages
1. general fiction
2. general non-fiction
3. historical fiction
4. biography & memoir
5. history

Were there any surprises?
I mean, did I really read that many Anne Rice books?

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?
Nope, see below.

Just for fun, What is longest book?
Clarissa!

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?
I feel like this shows that I don't really read series, first of all. I last read an Anne Rice book in ...? 2006 if I had to guess. I didn't even finish the last Dark Tower book, but it was also a significant amount of time ago. I only read the first 3 ASOIAF books. Harry Potter is there because I wanted credit for reading all of them out loud to my kids.

I also have a hard time returning to authors, even ones I meant to get back to. I am more likely to wander off and find someone new. So, since I entered all the King books I've read in my life (starting at 12), he has an outsized imprint here.

So mostly non-representative in authors and series, but the tags and genres line up with what I know about myself.

Q2: Pages

When this first came out a few weeks ago I had a play with it and did a little bit of manual adding of page counts. It’s still not at all complete: only about 80% of my books have page counts in the catalogue, and of course that will be skewed away from old and unpopular books, which are the most likely not to have page counts recorded. FWIW:

Authors:
Author Pages Books
P. G. Wodehouse 21,845 88
William Makepeace Thackeray 15,029 31
Patrick O'Brian 7,734 22
Reginald Hill 7,435 19
Simon Raven 7,372 27

Thackeray is inflated because I have a battered Complete Works as well as nicer second copies of quite a few books.

Series:

Series Pages Books
Dalziel and Pascoe 7,435 19
Aubrey-Maturin 7,174 20
Discworld 7,128 20
Waverley Novels 4,564 8
Lord Peter Wimsey 4,387 12

Pratchett just fails to make the top five in the author lists. I enjoyed the books when I first read them — the perfect length and weight for a short-haul flight — but I haven’t read any of them for many years, and I’ve been giving them away to free shelf space. The jokes don’t improve with re-reading. I’ve also given away a lot of the Dalziel and Pascoes, I don’t really reread those.

Notice how Zola doesn’t appear: I read all the Rougon-Macquart books in either ebooks or very old French editions, so there are no page counts for them. The series is somewhere in the 7000-8000 page range, I think, so it would certainly displace Lord Peter from the top five.

Tags:

Tag Pages Books
fiction 519,046 1,698
LGBT 75,332 253
19th century 70,082 168
history 68,185 164
poetry 61,069 318

That shouldn’t be a surprise. I wasn’t really expecting “19th century”, but it was the golden age of the three-decker novel…

Genres:

Genre Pages Books
General Fiction 448,309 1,448
General Nonfiction 131,719 338
LGBTQ+ 107,601 362
History 102,869 269
Biography & Memoir 88,000 261

Predictable, and the first two are completely meaningless categories anyway.

Longest book
Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet: Mikrogramme 1924-1933 by Robert Walser — 2264 pages. A bit of a cheat, because it’s a six-volume set. And also it only appears in the stats because I seem to have forgotten to catalogue my two-volume New shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which is 3801 pages.

QUESTION 2: Pages

To make my answers more meaningful, I am using my Read collection, which includes books I own, owned, and read but do not own. Otherwise, my wishlist would just swamp everything...

Top 5 Authors by Pages
Terry Pratchett - 5879 pages (It looks like he's in most people's Top 5!)
Margaret Atwood - 4779 pages
Victor Hugo - 4674 pages
Anthony Trollope - 4568 pages
Collectif (I should really go back and fill in individual authors for these) - 3351 pages
And since Collectif isn't really an author, I'll add the next one on the list: China Miéville - 3012

Top 5 Series by Pages
Discworld by Terry Pratchett
Les misérables by Victor Hugo
Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
I'm not sure anything other than Discworld qualifies as a series, but I'm not unhappy they're there.

Top 5 Tags by Pages
Top tag is Read, which is not very interesting. The next 5 are:
non-fiction
in translation
SF
POC
women's studies

Top 5 Genres by Pages
Top genre is General Fiction - again, not very interesting. The next 5 are:
General Nonfiction
Science Fiction
History
Fantasy
Historical Fiction

I'm surprised General Nonfiction is so high in the list. I suspect it's because it's more likely to be filled-in than some of the other genres. I also wasn't expecting Historical Fiction to be there because I don't read a lot books marketed as such - I often find them tedious. I am guessing novels set in the writer's past were included into the category...

Were there any surprises?
See above for genres.
The inclusion of "Collectif" as an author with a page count high enough to make it to the Top 5 surprised me at first, but after thinking about it, it makes sense: that's who all those big dictionaries are attributed to.

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?
"Forgotten about" is a bit strong, but I haven't read anything substantial by Tolstoy or Victor Hugo recently. I've enjoyed the Neapolitan quartet, and I'll probably read some more Ferrante in the future, but I have no immediate plans for it. Same for Trollope and Atwood. I haven't read any China Miéville novels in the last 3-4 years, but I mean to.

Just for fun, What is your longest book?
Computer says Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme by Pierre-André Taguieff et al. is the longest, with 2032 pages.

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?

Top authors is an accurate representation of the most prolific authors I've read the most, but not of my reading or of my shelves because I tend to read very disparately, which makes for a list with a very long tail. I am not a completist.

Top series is interesting. Discworld is first because there are a lot of them and I read and enjoyed them all, but arguably, I wouldn't have bought so many (and then once they were in the house, read them) if my daughter hadn't loved them so much. They will be going to her house as soon as she has the space for them.
The inclusion of an English series, a French series, an Italian series, a Russian series, and an Arabic (from Egypt) series is sort of representative of my tastes for translated and world fiction, with a base of Anglo and French fiction, mostly literary, with some SFF thrown in. So, it's representative in a generic way. And they're all authors I enjoy(ed) very much. However, people should not look at the titles and assume I have an Italian or a Russian fetish, or that I am a Ferrante fangirl.

>81 labfs39: I agree that LT does something funky with genres. Sometimes I have to scratch my head in wonderment at how they classify something. Not to mention the categories they have listed as genres which aren't actually genres at all, like "Young Adult," and "Teen."

Those are demographic categories, not genres! They're the same type of non-genre label as "Adult" and "General Audience." There are books of many different genres that fall within each demographic category. It drives me nuts!

This was a fun exercise. Can't say I'm surprised by my results though: the most pages seem to go to the authors who write the longest books!

Top 5 Authors by Pages

Marcel Proust
Joyce Carol Oates (have read a LOT of her books)
William Vollman (haven't read much, but I'm collecting the Seven Dreams series)
Elizabeth George
Emile Zola

Top 5 Series by Pages

lynley/Havers
Rougon Macquart
Poldark
Harry Hole
Seven Dreams

Tags (Boring!)

Fiction
TBR
Kindle
Nonfiction
Collections Only (This is the tag I use for books not in my physical library. I then usually differentiate by "gave away," "library book," or "borrowed."

Genres (Boring!)

General Fiction
General Nonfiction
Historical Fiction
History
Biography/Memoir

I was surprised Mystery/Crime didn't come up in the top 5 (it was 6th), and also surprised by "Historical Fiction," but maybe I define Historical Fiction differently than LT.

For fun, my second 5 authors by page were: Trollope, Doris Lessing, Ruth Rendell, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Dickens.

Question 2.....

Top Series by Pages
Inspector Banks by Peter Robinson
DCI Lorimer by Alex Gray
Dalziel and Pasco by Reginal Hill
Inspector Rebus by Ian Rankin
Lynley and Havers by PD James
Foundation series (SF, original author Asimov)

Top Tags by Pages:
1. fiction
2. Read no longer own
3.nonfiction
4. SFandF
5. Crime novel
(more interesting is the next five: 6. Women’s Studies 7. Literary Reference 8. arc* 9.Poetry. 10. Short fiction collection. *from my bookstore era, not LT.

Top Authors by Pages
Joyce Carol Oates
Margaret Atwood
Peter Robinson
China Mieville
Adam Roberts*
*probably technically, but while I have all Roberts books in my library, I haven’t read them all. Michael and I sort of take turns.)

Top Genres by Pages
1. General Fiction
2. SF
3. General Nonfiction
4. Mystery
5. Crime Novel
Note: reminder that this is LT’s genres. I use Crime Novel for both mystery and crime novels, so I expect the same list, using my tag, would place at least number 2

Were there any surprises? Yes! how much I wish I had records from my first 50 years of reading (might have technically been 45)

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)? No, nothing, no one.

Just for fun, What is longest book? The Norton Anthology of American Literature (2688 pages!)

My “LT library” is what LT says it is. It can’t be anything else. If you mean do these breakdowns accord with my sense of what my LT library is? Stats is only one way to look at it.

Looking only in my Read collection (and that covers mostly only paper books - ebooks and audiobooks do not (always) have pages recorded):

Top Authors by Pages
Robert B. Parker (16,877 pages) - no surprise here, he is prolific and I had been working through his books (mostly done :( )
Nora Roberts (14,375 pages) - most of them under the J. D. Robb name.
Erle Stanley Gardner (11,489 pages) - one of my "read through" projects so no surprise here either
Peter F. Hamilton (11,005 pages) -- the guy does not have that many books but they tend to be long
Daniel Silva (9,064 pages) - another read through...

Top Series by Pages
In Death (14,151 pages) - and that is with a few missing books that I had read I think
Spenser (14,124 pages) - that includes the continuation after Parker's death so it will keep growing.
Perry Mason (9,766 pages) - they may be short but there are a lot of them (and I have a couple of short stories left only :()
Gabriel Allon (7,272 pages)
Alex Delaware (6,844 pages) - that one will get higher when I read the few in the middle I had not read.

Top Tags by Pages
read, library, lib:Scottsdale Public Library, series:part and language:English

My tags are usually boring :)

Top Genres by Pages
Mystery (177,221 pages)
Science Fiction (84,190 pages)
Suspense & Thriller (67,402 pages)
Fantasy (49,861 pages)
General Fiction (39,226 pages)

See my note on page sizes though...

Were there any surprises?

Not really. I tend to stick to authors and series and these are either very prolific or write long books or both.

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?
That's mostly my reading for the last 11 years so that does not apply much. I was surprised Cherryh did not make top 5 but then her books tend to be printed with small fonts so the page numbers are usually not that bad (Word counts on the other hand...)

Just for fun, What is longest book?
The Naked God by Peter F. Hamilton at 1,358 pages. And it is a third in the trilogy (the first two in that trilogy are 1,108 and 1,168 respectively. And it is not because of a font thing: The Naked God is 456k words (for comparison David Copperfield is ~350K words). Which is how he made it to top 5 authors... (his books these days are shorter (about half of the size of these...)

That's probably my only surprise: I expected the answer to be The History of the World as it is actually longer but due to the page size and fonts, apparently it is only 1,280 pages.

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?

Yes and no. Different genres (and sometimes publishers) use different page sizes and fonts and density so comparing pages is comparing apples and oranges. At the ends it kinda does resemble my usual pattern but that's because I've read most of my heavy hitters on paper. The lower you move, the less exact it gets unless I made a point to add page numbers for ebooks for example which I had for some things (which skews the stats even more). I wish I could record and do stats on word counts, especially for fiction.

>91 Julie_in_the_Library:

Genres are used to categorize things, often for marketing purposes. I've identified three broad types of genre, and all three are visible in the LT Genres system.

Content genres categorize works based on elements within them, and are what most people probably think of first when they see the term genre. These are things like fantasy, mystery, romance, horror, etc.

Demographic genres categorize works based on the primary target demographic for those works. This is where you get things like young adult, teen, adult, middle grade, etc.

Media/Format genres categorize works based on their form. Probably the most common one here on LT is "Graphic Novels & Comics"

Having all the different genre types mixed together under a single bucket does make things frustrating, especially if you're only wanting to focus on one type. But they're all valid ways to divide one's library.

>92 arubabookwoman: Joyce turned up as #1 for me :-) Regarding boring genre names: we could rename them! Fiction could be "The Happy Land of Make Believe" and history could be: "Alas, the Past!" and Mysteries could be: "Butler, Knives and Tolling Bells". (clearly, I've been convalescing too long... )

'

Top 5 authors:

Doris Lessing (8,853 pages)
H G Wells (5428 pages)
Patrick White (4346 pages)
Shakespeare (3546 pages)
Iain M. Banks (2999 pages)

No surprises here as I had projects to read Lessing Wells and White

Top Series

Oxford History of England
The Culture - Iain M Banks
Children Of Violence - Dorsi Lessing
Mémoires - Simone de Beauvoir
The Hundred Years War - Jonathan Sumption

Top tags
I have given up tagging my books

Top Genres
General Fiction
History
General Non-Fiction
Science Fiction
Biography and Memoir

Largest Book is The Riverside Chaucer

There were no surprises for me and so I think this is an accurate feature of the books I have read, because I have only included books I have read in my LT library

>96 avaland: This demands further elaboration

>95 shadrach_anki: actually this simple division is helpful to me. But there is an implied (if subjective) relationship between content and demographics.

>98 dchaikin: There is...but it's variable. For instance, Mercedes Lackey has been writing fantasy (about magic horses, even) for a long time; she was marketed as YA for years. Then one of her series within that universe had a gay main character...and suddenly she was in adult fantasy/SF, in bookstores and in libraries. Gee, I wonder why... It's become more mixed now, she may be in either or both places (including that series), but the switch was instant at the time (90s, I think).

I have found some very deep and complex stories in YA and even childrens; I have found some shallow and fluffy stories marketed to adults. So I tend to entirely ignore those categories and just look for stories that sound interesting - in a practical sense, when I browse (bookstore/library/etc) I check all three areas (adult, childrens, YA).

Who or what are your top five in each category?

The top five authors: William Shakespeare, Alexander McCall Smith, John Steinbeck, Donald Venes, and Zondervan (!). (These last two "authors" cracked me up - I'll get to that in the "surprises" question.)

The top series: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Crazy Rich Asians, Crispin Guest, Don't Know Much About, and Chronicles of Narnia.

The top tags: library book, own, book club pick/library book; book club pick I need to read, wishlist.

Top genres: General Nonfiction, General Fiction, Biography & Memoir, Religion & Spirituality, and Historical Fiction.

Longest book: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. (Do I even own this book?)

Were there any surprises? Yes! I was surprised that William Shakespeare showed up at the top of my author's list. Just because I own Shakespeare does not mean that I have actually read it. I have certainly read my fair share of The Bard over the last few years, but not enough to justify him coming in at the top. I had to look up Donald Venes - apparently he is the author of Taber's Medical Dictionary - one of the first books I added to my LT account.

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?
When I first joined LT, I joined the "Steinbeckathon" and fell in love with his writing (I was already a fan of the movie, "Cannery Row" and the short novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. I reread Cannery Row every year and am planning on rereading East of Eden soon. I do not see a reading future where Steinbeck is not included. Guess all that is to say I planted my reading flag on the Land of Steinbeck and I ain't leaving. LOL ;)

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?
Thank you SassyLassy (and thorold) for pointing out this feature!

The "top genres" is spot on. According to the "Pages" feature, my top genres are general nonfiction, general fiction, and biography and memoir. This is an accurate snapshot of my reading life at this very moment (even though I have not added these to my library here). My first read of the year was a novel In Five Years. The two books I am reading/listening to now are Atomic Habits and Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir. The first is general nonfiction and the latter is, of course, a memoir.

>100 avidmom: Your comments about the Steinbeckathon made me wonder "hey, why didn't Steinbeck show up on mine?" because I did that too. He's in 6th. :)

>100 avidmom: Ive loved Steinbeck since jr hi reading of grapes of wrath thought Id read them all till i happened upon the short reign of pippin IV I never realized he could be so hilarious. Throughout there are more or less subtle and amusing observations at they way countries are ruled, the way corporations are ruled and what happens to people who are thrust into positions of power against their will. Highly recommended

>95 shadrach_anki: I've identified three broad types of genre, and all three are visible in the LT Genres system....But they're all valid ways to divide one's library.

I agree wholeheartedly that they're all valid ways to divide one's library. I just don't agree that they're all *genres*. Not every category type that we use to discuss and categorize books is a genre, nor do they need to be.

I get that I'm being pedantic here, but this is one of my pet peeves. And it's not like my Being Opinionated on the Internet is stopping anyone from disagreeing, or using the word genre to refer to whatever they want, so I don't see any real harm in my pedantry. *shrugs*

My page count reports:

Top Authors by Pages

Stephen King
Terry Pratchett
C.J. Cherryh
Neil Gaiman
Isaac Asimov

I would have guessed Pratchett would be at the top here -- there are a lot of Discworld books, and I own more or less all of them -- but on reflection Stephen King makes a lot of sense. I don't remotely own all of his books, but they tend to be much, much longer than Pratchett's.

C.J. Cherryh surprises me, but probably shouldn't, as I have some long books and longer series by her (too many of which are still on the TBR shelves).

Neil Gaiman is a mild surprise, because he's nowhere near as long-winded as King and I didn't think he'd written quite as much as Pratchett, but I do have a lot of stuff by him, especially when you take into account all the graphic novels.

Asimov was a favorite of my youth. I'm a little surprised that he still makes this list even now, but he was ridiculously prolific.

Top Series by Pages

All five of these are variations on "Star Trek books" and "Doctor Who books." Not surprising, but kind of boring, especially as it's mostly just five different ways of saying two different things. The Star Trek stuff is mostly (although not entirely) from my younger days. The Doctor Who books still find their way onto my shelves faster than I can read them, though.

Top Tags by Pages

Fiction
Non-fiction
Paperpack
Unread
Doctor Who

No surprises, very boring.

Top Genres by Pages

Science Fiction
General Fiction
General Non-fiction
Fantasy
Science & Nature

Also not super surprising. General Fiction might be a bit higher on the list than I would have expected, but then, it is a very broad category.

Just for fun, What is longest book?

Hmm. The page lists Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever 2000 (which is... a book that was vaguely useful in 2000) at 1,700 pages. But I know that's not right. Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia is cataloged at 3,067 pages, and I'm pretty sure that's the longest book I own.

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?

It's not entirely misleading, I suppose, but five per category is really too small a sample size to be representative.

QUESTION 2: Pages
I had fun answering this question, but I do wonder what I've been doing on LT for the past 13 years when I look at the results :-). This was a real trip down memory lane.

Top Authors by Pages
Agatha Christie
Peter Robinson
Michael Robotham
Robert Goddard
Diana Gabaldon

Top Series by Pages
Inspector Banks
Hercule Poirot
Outlander
Joseph O'Loughlin
Sebastian Bergman

Top Tags by Pages
Fiction
British fiction
Historical fiction
Non fiction
1001

Top Genres by Pages
General fiction
Mystery
Historical fiction
Suspense & thriller
General non fiction

Were there any surprises?
Yes and no: my top authors were mostly from my reading life pre-LT. Since then I read less series and more stand-alone books, which inevitably results in less pages per author. So it should not be a surprise that the more recent books and their authors are not well represented.

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?
Yes, I used to devour the books by Robert Goddard, but since 2010 I have only read one more and I was so disappointed that I have since ignored his books.

Just for fun, What is longest book?
The lord of the rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, a book that I really enjoyed a lot, long before the movies and the hype started. Which is fun, because fantasy is not a genre I like... or do I?

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?
Yes because it reflects my preference for mystery and historical fiction, and no because the page criterion puts too much emphasis on thick books and series and not enough on their diversity.

>101 ursula: I loved the Steinbeckathon :)

>102 cindydavid4: Steinbeck's The Short Reign of Pippin IV is one I have not read (yet). I love his dry humor.

there is plenty of that, and considering the publishing date (1957) it sounds just like today! the more things change....

Time I answered the question

QUESTION 2:

Top Authors by Pages:
Here I'm counting the top two as a tie, since they are really close at 8, 210 pages and 8, 102 pages: Charles Dickens and Emile Zola.
Way back at 5,802 pages and a real surprise and contrast is James Elroy, then
John le Carré
T C Boyle
Robert Louis Stevenson

George Eliot and Walter Scott also made it over the 5,000 page line.

Top Series by Pages
definitely les Rougon-Macquart, which I finished a couple of years ago.
the Waverly Novels
the Flashman Papers
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Martin Beck

Top Tags by Pages
Fiction American
Fiction English (this is fiction from England, not fiction in English)
History
Garden
20th C

Top Genres by Pages
General Fiction
General Nonfiction
History
Biography and Memoir
Historical Fiction

Were there any surprises?

I was amazed at how much James Elroy I'd read.

Fiction American always stumps me as my top tag, as does 20th C.

It's odd how we think of our books - I was expecting Russia and China to come closer to the top in tags, but because I've split my tags for those countries into fiction and nonfiction, they show up lower on the list than their aggregate totals would show. I also expected 19th C to show up higher, but it came in at 6.

LT's genres never make sense to me. General Fiction and General Nonfiction are categories far too broad to provide useful information. Similarly DDC has always been a problem for me as I often argue with its categories.

Are there any long lost authors there you had forgotten about (you once had a passion for author X and read everything X published, but left that world long ago)?

Hunter S Thompson, although I have to confess to watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the other night.

Mordecai Richler would also appear here. I'm in agreement with whichever pundit it was who said something along the lines of "I love Richler's latest book. I read it every time it comes out".

Flashman was a series that doesn't cross my mind much anymore. Reading it today, the language and attitudes would probably feel cringe worthy and more, but I think Fraser had a good time recreating the nineteenth century and inserting his beloved character into any and every action he could. It's not a series I would leave behind in a move.

Just for fun, What is the longest book?

It appears to be War and Peace, but that could be because I have multiple copies. My own guess would be Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Most importantly, do you feel this feature is an accurate representation of your LT books?

In some ways yes, but like others, I have difficulty with the genre classification.

image from CartoonStock

QUESTION 3: Distractions

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?

>Q3 I grew up in a small, crowded, noisy house of 8 people with lots of interruptions. I learned to read under this situation and I think it set me up to be able to adapt my reading to almost any circumstance. Clearly, it was quite difficult to read the 'heavy-hitters' with noisy, irritating siblings or later three small children of my own, so one adapts and finds books that work....and one's employment can be terribly distracting... And while books were essential, so was my creative drive so one has had to mediate between the two (yes, like children).

I'm retired now and can read when it calls me. I have not moved over to digital books as I still am terribly sentimental and love holding a traditional book (it's a sensory sort of thing with a long history now)

PS: I showed the hubby the cartoon....

Distractions and how I deal. The Internet has messed up my attention span, and my mind wanders more. I put my phone in another room when I read, which prevents me from refreshing the latest round of dumbassery in Congress. If I want to do serious reading, I do what I did in grad school: take a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches to bed and read there all day.

What's missing due to distractions? Nothing, though I no longer feel guilty about reading genre fiction or feel I must hide my junk reading sins from the Central Scrutinzer of English Teachers. I can read John Barth or Henry James one week and some werewolf bodice ripper the next with equal attention.

What would be on my bookshelf if there were no Kindles? I dunno. Maybe I would never have lost my attachment to physical books. Maybe I'd have bought more of those LoA volumes. Or maybe I would have come to the point I'm at now: Re-home these books now so I don't have to dust them, and read library books.

>110 avaland: Kids: I read an article one time that said if you want to make readers of your kids, model reading yourself. Don't be afraid to say, "Entertain yourself for an hour, I'm reading." I didn't take much practical advice from the childrearing literature out there, but I took that bit seriously.

My family thought I went way overboard on reading as a kid, though as a teenager I made up for it by dragging home inappropriate friends, going to demonstrations, mouthing off, playing The Who too loud, and smoking.

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

First, anything that takes my time - working, other life stuff and events and sports and shows (which are a family social event)

Second - my own head. Include here the time i waste online, or playing games. But also sometimes i just can’t read.

third - phone notifications. Especially variations of personal and work texts.

Fourth - I can read through many distractions and like reading in coffee shops. I don’t mind reading in waiting rooms if I’m not anxious about what i’m waiting for. But other people playing sounds on their phones is really hard to tune out. Also loud TV and some particularly loud and self-important conversations can be.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?

Once i sit down to focus, I mainly worry about my own attention span. Peace of mind is also necessary and not always available. But phone notifications can be a killer.

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

See above.

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?

I don’t manage this well. Just try to find the mood for the book I’m with. I struggle when I can’t do that. So mostly nothing is missing because of circumstance.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?

It’s tough for me to see before my online reading life because my reading changed a lot along with my LT presence. About the time I joined LT I also greatly expanded the amount I read. But I’m not sure LT caused it exactly. I think my reading expanding led me to LT, which then reinforced expanding my reading. So if no LT, I’m not really sure what happens. Before LT I didn’t do anything social online.

>109 SassyLassy: QUESTION 3: Distractions

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

Other books more often than not - especially if I have something waiting for me to finish a book.

The other big thing is my own head - sometimes I can read but I cannot concentrate in a way that sends everything else on the backburner so my brain keep splitting its attention between the book and something else.

Everything else is just life - work, cooking, cleaning - you know... the stuff you must do instead of reading. And then there is LT :)

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?

Usually annoyances. I can read while a fire alarm is blaring next to me (New Jersey Liberty Airport, AA terminal, I am looking at you). I can read while everyone around me is talking loudly. I try no make time for just reading and I live alone so interruptions are rare. Except in doctor offices and what's not but these are expected :)

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

See above. If I am reading and my brain is not trying to solve the problems of the world (or a work problem), I can read just fine no matter what. A side effect of growing up sharing a room and then spending a lot of time in public transport and living in a university dorm. I love it when it is silent and nice but as long as someone is not bugging me and trying to talk to me directly, I can read (and even then... I can be very antisocial at the best of days, I can dial it up to 11 when I am reading).

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?

You mean the next book I am reading? :) The only difference when I am on a plane (or when traveling or out and about) is not to carry a heavy book. Which sometimes means leaving a book home and starting a new one - on a kindle or on paper (for light weight ones). Other from that? At one point, I did most of my quality reading on a plane and at airports - I was spending more time there than in my own bed.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?

If internet was not invented, I probably won't be in the States and my shelves will be decidedly different - more Bulgarian literature, less English, possibly not as broad as it is now (LT and Amazon and other online things are responsible for me reading almost anything). If the Wall had not fallen, my library would look even more different. If I were born 10 years earlier, I would probably be in academia and my library will be very different. If I were born 10 years later, I would have probably never developed an appreciation for the classics of all genres (the books which were the most accessible when I was forming my tastes). If, if, if...

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?
Other forms of art -- television, movies, music. I'm beginning to come to terms with the idea that I will never read all the books (see all the movies, hear all the symphonies...), but they compete for my time.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance? How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?
When I'm reading, I'm reading. I don't need total silence, but if there's music playing, it can't be anything with words in it (and I often do have orchestral music playing in the background while I read). I do most of my reading alone in my room, so if the TV's on in the living room, it's only a dull roar, and that doesn't bother me.

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?
I liked to tell myself that I'd do more "serious" reading once I retired and had time to spend on such things, but I think I always knew that was me lying to myself. I'm just not a serious reading guy, and I am never going to find time to read the complete Proust or Dickens or Cather while there are so many fun books to read.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?
I like to read, but I'm mostly not into books as objects that I must own. I own some reference books, and some rare books that my library isn't likely to have. But these days, virtually all of my reading is books from the library, and most of that is e-books. So the only "xyz" that might change my shelves by its absence is the library; without it, I'd buy more books. But I suspect that I wouldn't keep most of them; once read, they'd be given to Little Free Libraries, or to other readers.

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

Knowing that other books are calling my name and I need to finish this one (or DNF) quickly so I can move on (jk)

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?

depends on who is doing the interrupting. My DH long ago learned to tell when I am completely into a book, and generally lets me be. Its just the two of us so usually there isn't a problem when I am reading at home. When I am outside and a dog is barking or music is loud I might go in, or try blocking it out Like Dan I really don't like phone calls so i put them on mute while im reading

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

I don't require silence, but I cannot read in chaos. so I have head phones so I can play music while I read in these stuations This also works outside or when I am in a crowd of some sort

without the internet?

I was reading when we didn't have a tv, so I suspect if there was no internet Id stll be reading (tho I would miss all the online buddies Ive found along the way)

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

Knowing that other books are calling my name and I need to finish this one (or DNF) quickly so I can move on (jk)

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?

depends on who is doing the interrupting. My DH long ago learned to tell when I am completely into a book, and generally lets me be. Its just the two of us so usually there isn't a problem when I am reading at home. When I am outside and a dog is barking or music is loud I might go in, or try blocking it out

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

I don't require silence, but I cannot read in chaos. so I have head phones so I can play music while I read in these stuations This also works outside or when I am in a crowd of some sort

without the internet?

I was reading when we didn't have a tv, so I suspect if there was no internet Id stll be reading (tho I would miss all the online buddies Ive found along the way)

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

The major distraction from reading books is streaming videos. I'm on the internet constantly during the day, but in bits here and there that wouldn't otherwise be spent reading a book. The problem scenario is when I have a block of time, typically in the late evening, and choose to watch instead of read.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?

I can tune out external noise fairly easily, can read in waiting rooms or restaurants or public transportation or wherever. The problem isn't little interruptions but larger life demands that sap mental energy.

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

I read reliably when I have an obligation to other people, e.g. with RL book groups. I set a pace of 25-ish pages per day and stick to it. When I was keeping up with the 75-ers, I set a faster pace and really it wasn't that difficult. What I mostly need is a habit so it feels wrong if I slack off. I've lost the habit in recent years.

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?

With few exceptions, my paper books are non-fiction and my e-books are fiction. I realized a few months ago that I was avoiding paper books because of eye strain, and got my eyeglass prescription updated. I have an e-book app on my phone so I can read anywhere, but in recent years I haven't gone anywhere. RL book groups are something of a tradeoff, social connections but not necessarily books I'd choose otherwise. The obligations become a priority, and remaining time and energy are limited. I've collected any number of books that are hypothetically interesting but require actual work, and I'm too tired.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?

I'd own far fewer books without LT or Amazon.

QUESTION 3: Distractions

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

As a couple of others already said: other books, life, people. Work, until I retired.

And concerts, films, theatre, opera, etc. If the internet hadn’t been invented I’m sure I’d be going to someone’s house to watch these on their Betamax when I wasn’t going to live performances.

But I’m not sure if I should count these “big things” as distractions, because they are all things I value just as highly as reading. Perhaps the real distractions are the little things: unimportant phone calls, unnecessary bits of housework, DIY/repair/craft projects, the need to get off the couch to buy food, the need to turn over the record every twenty minutes or so, etc.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?

Both: some things can stop me reading altogether for a day or two, other things just mean putting the book down while I deal with them. A house-guest or a practical project can take my mind off books altogether.

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

I don’t easily get distracted by trivial external stuff, it’s the things going on in my own mind that take me out of my book. I find trains, planes, airports and waiting rooms are good places to get reading done, because I’m focussed on making good use of the time. But I miss the NHS — since I moved to Holland, I’ve had to deal with the problem that doctors usually see you at the time they say they will, not two hours later as in England, so you barely get any time sitting in waiting rooms…

Small boats are surprisingly good for reading if I’m with just one other person who likes to read too (although a lot depends on having an e-reader with a lighted screen), but if I’m with a group there’s always the risk that all the evenings are spent in restaurants or bars…

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?

I think I tend to read what I’m reading, more or less independent of the circumstances, except for considerations about the physical embodiment of the book: very heavy or delicate things don’t get tossed in the rucksack for travel. If a book needs a finger in the end-notes, an atlas open next to me, and a bit of paper for taking notes, then that cuts down opportunities for reading it a bit too. My big RAE edition of Quijote keeps getting put aside and forgotten for that sort of reason.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?

Something different, obviously. (Although not very different, since over half my library pre-dates the era when the internet started to have a big impact.) There are books I wouldn’t have known about without the internet (and specifically, without LT), and books I would have known about but probably wouldn’t have been able to find. But there would have been more secondhand bookshops around for me to find random treasures in. And I would have had less reason to neglect the public library, and would probably also have spent time using university libraries and the KB now that I’m retired.

QUESTION 3: Distractions

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

My husband! I sit on the couch, start reading ... and he starts talking. Usually in the pattern of talking - 30 seconds of silence - talking - 30 seconds of silence. After a few noncommittal responses from me, he'll ask "oh, are you reading?" (To be fair, I'm often reading on my phone so it looks just like when I'm about to menace him with a cute cat video.)

The cats, if they're fighting or scratching the walls. Or chasing each other across me.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?
How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

If I'm getting interrupted by either of those situations above often enough that I am spending more time trying to figure out where I was than reading, it becomes an actual put-the-book-down interruption. Noise bothers me not at all. When I was young, I used to read and do my homework with both the tv and the radio on at the same time. Construction, whatever - it doesn't get to me.

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?

Being literal for a moment - I rarely read on airplanes. I always have reading material but honestly I end up sleeping or just looking out the window. But in a more general sense, I read very little non-fiction because my main time to read is just before bed and I don't want to read non-fiction then and/or don't retain it well then.

>119 thorold: But I’m not sure if I should count these “big things” as distractions, because they are all things I value just as highly as reading

yes this

>119here are books I wouldn’t have known about without the internet

oh I hadn't thought of that. I am much more likely to get on the net to find a book, instead of what I used to do, go to the library, or happily browse used bookstores looking for treasure

I love that you still are turning over albums. I have a few that I treasure from my parents, broadway soundtracks

>119 thorold: But I miss the NHS — since I moved to Holland, I’ve had to deal with the problem that doctors usually see you at the time they say they will, not two hours later as in England, so you barely get any time sitting in waiting rooms…

I startled myself by laughing out loud in a quiet house!

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?
I was a very late adopter of Netflix when they first started mailing disks around because I feared it would cut into my reading time. And so it has transpired. My wife and I usually watch a TV show or two in a night before we both settle in to read.

My wife is in the habit of making occasional comments to me about whatever she's reading, whether from her own book or from an article she's perusing online. Whether that's a minor annoyance or a minor+ annoyance at the time depends on what I'm reading and where I am in the story. An interruption from a particularly engrossing scene or section can feel more disruptive. On the other hand, I really do want my wife to feel free to share things that she wants to share with me, and overall I'm happy that she wants to.

And then there's Rosie, the German shepherd, who once or twice a night decides she wants to chase her ball across the house. I generally read in an easy chair in the living room. That means a human has to throw it. She's gotten adept at sticking her snout under one side of my book and flipping it closed. I kid you not.

Occasionally I distract myself by taking a short break from my book and checking the News app on my iPhone. When this stretches past 15 minutes, I begin to regret the book reading time I've missed. Although, I don't know, maybe that counts as the internet.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?
Other than my wife's comments about her own reading, these are actual interruptions. Or, in the case of Netflix shows and the like, more like delays than interruptions.

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?
I don't require total silence, though I can't have the sound of speech going (TV or radio programs). The exception is baseball games. My wife and I are both baseball fans and can read to a game on with sound at relatively low levels. I can easily read in noisy airports, waiting rooms and restaurants/cafes and the like, though. That sort of noise is easy for me to block out.

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?
No, not for me. The only disqualifiers for bringing particular books along on plane rides/vacations are a) I usually avoid bringing a large, heavy hardcover on a trip and b) I don't like to have to worry about a book being damaged in some way while traveling, so I will avoid bringing particularly old and/or valuable books on trips. Other than that, there's no subject matter or genre of books that I consider more or less appropriate to any particular venue or activity.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?
I can't imagine what would be different. Most rooms in our house have at least one set of bookshelves, most have several. In the living room, it's bookshelves and record shelves, as I, too, still love my LP and have around 3,000 all told. So I guess we'd have more books if there was no such thing as LPs. And also my wife and I both prefer not to cover up all the walls with shelving, because we both like having art/photos on the walls. So I'd have more books if there were no such thing as paintings and prints. I'm not sure if I've answered the question, though.

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet?

My reading has to take its place among other interests. I listen to a lot of music and I play the saxophone. I walk most days in an effort to keep fit. I think its important to be involved in village life and my duties as secretary to the committee des fêtes takes some time. Of course I spend time with my partner and we eat all our meals together and watch some TV in the evenings. I enjoy cooking and I make our main meal in the evening. Gardening is both a hobby and a chore, perhaps the garden is a bit too big now. We are still taking french lessons and have homework to do. Then there is the upkeep of an old farmhouse. If I did not do all these things then I think I would read more books. However I have taken a bit of positive action I can usually resist switching on the computer until mid afternoon. The only social media site I do is LibraryThing. We have chosen to backtrack on social engagements with the ex-pat community.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?
How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

I try very hard not to be annoyed if my reading is interrupted. Reading is a fairly selfish pastime, when I am reading I am in my own world, I am not sharing it with anybody. It is much more easy to share other pastimes, like watching films or listening to music, or exploring the countryside. I am fortunate to have my own room in our large house and so I can be alone to read. If I am reading outside my room then I expect to be interrupted and it is not a problem.

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?

Having my own room in the house means I have the space to read what I want.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?

The obvious answer to this is my shelves would be full of reference books and encyclopaedias (do you remember them?) if the internet had not been invented.

OK... am I missing something not so literal as what it actually says (aka... a book you read while on a plane/trip) that "airplane reads" is supposed to mean?

>125 AnnieMod: Kind of like "beach reads" or "summer reads". Generally it means something light and fast-paced that you can read relatively quickly.

>126 ursula: Interesting, I think of airplane reads as books that you don't mind everyone and their brother knowing that you are reading. Not that I care in the least, but I am as voyeuristic as the next avid reader and know the titles of what everyone is reading on the plane (or at least between me and the bathroom and/or exit door).

>127 labfs39: I think that probably also applies!

>125 AnnieMod: >126 ursula: >127 labfs39: All of these apply. Since I loathe flying, and am terrified the whole flight, I think of them as something that with any luck will take my mind of my imminent death. That means for me they have to be gripping (fast-paced), and light so that I don't have to work out huge family trees while mentally controlling the flight:)

Beach reads would also fit the descriptions in >126 ursula: and >127 labfs39:, as would some commuting books.

How does everyone else think of them?

Re "xyz" in the question: this doesn't apply only to the internet; I meant it to be a whole range of things or happenings.

>126 ursula: >127 labfs39: >128 ursula: >129 SassyLassy:

I see. I don't care who sees what I read so it never crosses my mind to self-edit my reading when in public. The only thing that changes my reading is the size/weigth (and occasionally the fragility and/or smudgability) of the book.

>130 AnnieMod: I don't worry about that either, so it wouldn't have occurred to me but I can understand that take on it.

>129 SassyLassy: I used to be terrified to fly, and actually that was originally where I was going to go with it - that it needs to be something enthralling enough to keep your mind occupied - but then I wasn't sure if that was a "just me" thing. But it also should be balanced with something that isn't too badly affected by being interrupted incessantly with flight announcements, drink and meal carts, people bumping past, your rowmates needing in and out, etc.

Re airplane books. Since I fly mostly to visit family, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. On the trip up (they're north of me) I have more bandwidth to read something complex than I do on the way back. So I may start something new and interesting on the initial flight, but on the way home it is primarily mysteries and science fiction.

>125 AnnieMod: etc. It’s always a puzzle: do you want to advertise what you’re reading to entice people of similar tastes into conversation, or to discourage philistines from disturbing you? do you want to impress your fellow travellers or to blend into the background with the bestseller of the moment? Or are you using an e-reader?

I don’t really fly regularly any more, but when I did I tended to take the Kobo together with an expendable paperback for those situations where the Kobo decides to run out of battery unexpectedly or freezes up for no obvious reason (this only ever happens when travelling). The expendable paperback rarely got used, so the same one sometimes stayed in my bag for months at a time. Often a Simenon or something like that.

>129 SassyLassy: For some reason I automatically read “xyz” as “Internet”! If “xyz” can be anything, then maybe we should be asking what would have been different about my reading if movable type had been invented by Laurens Janszoon Coster instead of some guy from Mainz, or if we had never got electric light…

I have a sneaking suspicion that the fundamental shape of my reading habits was defined in childhood, and everything that has happened since has just nudged things a little bit. I didn’t notice any dramatic change when I moved from England to Holland, or more recently when I retired from work. Probably there wouldn’t have been a huge change if my personal life had taken a different course: some influences would have been added and others taken away, but I would still have been looking for books that inform, entertain, challenge or distract in one combination or another.

>130 AnnieMod: he only thing that changes my reading is the size/weigth (and occasionally the fragility and/or smudgability) of the book.

this exactly. Remember in my backpacking days Id choose the most beat up paperback on my shelves to read. When I finished it was usually unreadable, so Id recycle it. When Im vactioning somewhere its always a paperback, just a couple, with the hope that I find a bookstore for more!

I rarely fly anymore;When we are on a drive I always several books to choose from and am able read along the way. My DH cant do that so he is usuallly the driver, leaving me free to read to my hearts content

>133 thorold: “ etc. It’s always a puzzle: do you want to advertise what you’re reading to entice people of similar tastes into conversation, or to discourage philistines from disturbing you? do you want to impress your fellow travellers or to blend into the background with the bestseller of the moment?”

I would kind of roll my eyes, but once a flight attendant asked me what I was reading, and I showed him my book, a collection of stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which I was basically about to start. He said, “ah, the master”. Somehow I loved that and remembered it, and read the whole book thinking, yeah, he is the master. But that’s been the beginning and end of my flight literary drama.

"Do you want to advertise what you’re reading to entice people of similar tastes into conversation, or to discourage philistines from disturbing you? Do you want to impress your fellow travellers or to blend into the background with the bestseller of the moment?”

This type of thing can backfire dreadfully.

As an undergrad, I would sit in the student union reading Lord of the Rings in hopes of attracting some literary type boy. Sadly, the boys LotR attracted, instead of inviting you out for a beer, would bum your cigarettes while going on and on about the origins of the Nazgul or something.

It put me off Tolkien, even though I was a budding medievalist.

>135 dchaikin: I have occasionally been chatted up by strangers on the basis of the book I was reading, but never on a plane, as far as I can remember. The thing that happens more often is that someone (neighbour, flight attendant, train conductor) notices my book and uses it to decide what language to address me in, which can lead to amusing situations when it’s neither their preferred language nor mine…

>136 nohrt4me2: Yes. The trouble is that what we’ve read in the past always says a lot more about us than what we’re reading now, which might well be a false step of some kind. Of course that’s the whole point of LibraryThing…

>129 SassyLassy: >130 AnnieMod: >131 ursula: >131 ursula: I know the conversation moved on a bit, but I also wanted to add that it is very important that your airplane book is unemotional. Because the only thing worse than being trapped in a tiny seat, crammed in amongst strangers for several hours is sobbing, trying to hide the fact that you're sobbing, and making weird snorty noises as you try to stem the tears/mucus long enough to walk down the long narrow aisle past dozens and dozens of more strangers to the bathroom to get some tissues.

>138 ELiz_M: Speaking from experience, Liz? Curious to know which book it was!

>138 ELiz_M: as well as reading a hilarious book (IIRC Bill Bryson neither here nor there) on the Tube. Brit passengers were not happy with my loud guffaws, gasps for air, and giggling under my breath.

>137 thorold: "Yes. The trouble is that what we’ve read in the past always says a lot more about us than what we’re reading now, which might well be a false step of some kind. Of course that’s the whole point of LibraryThing…"

Not sure I agree, assuming I read you right. I don't think that what somebody read says anything definitive about them. I don't think of any book as a "false step." Even when something is bad, like George RR Martin or Anne McCaffrey (imo), it can be fun to analyze.

>140 cindydavid4: The Tube is (or used to be — I haven't been on it in years) like a very noisy moving library, full of invisible "Silence!" notices...

>141 nohrt4me2: I probably expressed that a bit clumsily. I didn't mean to suggest that we are defined by what we've read, but rather that our global reading history (or the selection of books on our shelves) says something interesting about what sort of people we might be, whilst the book we happen to be reading at the moment is just a random snapshot that might or might not be relevant, for all kinds of reasons. We all read at least some books that "don't fit", maybe because that's all we could find, or we picked them up by mistake, or someone gave them to us, or we're reading them to discuss or write about, or whatever.

>137 thorold: et. al. "I have occasionally been chatted up by strangers on the basis of the book I was reading, but never on a plane, as far as I can remember."

Tell me if this is a phenomenon that anyone else here has noticed or whether it's just my imagination. Whenever I'm on a plane, subway, etc., and I see someone with a book, I become quite eager to figure out what book they're reading. I'm not even sure quite why. But I find that when people see me trying to look at their book, they begin, either consciously or unconsciously I'm never sure, to start maneuvering the book to hide the front cover so I can't see the title. I don't know whether they think I might be a stalker who will use the book title to try to start an unwanted conversation, or if they're just naturally reticent to disclose this sort of information about themselves (what they read) as a holdover from Patriot Act paranoia (there's the "tell" that I'm in the U.S.), or if it's all an off-kilter fantasy on my part. Of course there's also the plain fact that as I've gotten older, it's gotten harder for me to read book titles at a glance from any distance away at all, so maybe it's my awkward squint that's the problem.

>140 cindydavid4: that was my 1st Bryson (Neither Here nor There)- which I picked up from the cheap stacks at a Borders, knowing nothing about the author or book, and read a few pages and was immediately smitten, and then paid the $4 or whatnot. I think Americans take brunt of it in the text. But it came across as so charming.

>142 thorold: When we were on the Tube in the early 90s, it might have been noisy, but it seemed laughter was frowned upon,. It may h ave changed by now.

>139 labfs39: I might have been a tad hyperbolic, but the stress/anxiousness/exhaustion associated with air travel does mean I am more susceptible to an overly emotional reaction to books/movies. I did make the mistake of reading Do Not Say We Have Nothing on a long flight. Luckily most passenger were asleep and didn't witness the messy crying, but I've made a point of having a thriller or two on hand for airport/plane reading ever since.

>143 rocketjk: Wouldn't it be better just to ask the person what book they are reading? otherwise one might think you are a bit creepy. I mean how far do you go with this; if they are backing away from you and trying to cover up their book, do you still lurch forward, perhaps knocking their hand down. (only joking)

QUESTION 3: Distractions

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet? Anything that's not reading? I'd say top of the list is work, because I work a lot, and I tend to never quite turn it all the way off (which probably makes me sound like the most boring workaholic in the world, but I mostly love what I do so it's not a complete grind). That, followed by all the other necessities—housework, cooking, shopping—which take up an awful lot of time. And the NY Times crossword puzzle, which I'm pretty compulsive about.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance Definite interruptions, in that they cut into my reading time. I've been working some really long hours lately, and often I can only read a couple of pages in bed at the end of the day before I pass out—cf the fact that I just finished my first book of 2023.

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence? As far as intermittent distractions, when I do have some solid reading time I don't bother with email or the phone, but I will look at texts—not necessarily answer them, but that's how a lot of my friends and I keep in touch these days and I'll at least see who's pinging me. I can't read with TV or music in the same room, though. My husband likes TV and I don't, but we have a big enough house that it's not an issue. Plus he's got good headphones and uses them, which is why we've been married a long time.

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read? After reading the conversation here I know what you're talking about, but on first seeing this question I was thinking of books you read when you have long uninterrupted stretches of time. And to answer that question, I'll definitely bring bigger books or nonfiction on a flight or train trip (ebooks, that is) if I'm not in the middle of something else. I love having those chunks of reading time, and since I don't commute any more I miss them. It doesn't matter what I'm reading in public because I almost always travel with the iPad instead of physical books, just for the sake of what I can pack and carry, so nobody is going to know what I'm reading unless they're looking over my shoulder. And they'd better not do that.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?
I think my bookshelves would be a lot less interesting without the internet. My involvement in online book discussions, circa 2003, led me to working in publishing/library media—it was a very straight shot. Before I joined my first online literary forum I was an office manager, and even though I read a lot and widely and had IRL friends to talk about my reading with, I don't think I'd have had the same trajectory (which includes blogging about books, publishing, and libraries for years just because it was fun).

Here's a bit of something avaland has been pondering: more to follow.



image from Canva

QUESTION 3: Your Reading Background

Each of us approaches any given book with our own individual reading background.

How well do we recognize what we as readers bring to a book? Is it important to know what this background is?

Does knowing your reading-self help you distinguish between a "bad" book and what is merely a "bad book choice" for you that may be just right for someone else?

Q3:

I would say that I am a moody reader. If I'm not in the right mood for something, I will struggle to enjoy it no matter how well it's written. Of course, occasionally a book can jolt me out of a mood, but usually I try and match a book and my mood for the benefit of us both. That's why I like challenges that are open ended and not specific. Read a novel from North Africa—that I can do. Read The Bostonians—that I would struggle with doing. Years ago Monica/Trifolia/JustJoey posted this and I still have it on my profile:

You and I know too many different things, entertain too many different thoughts, hold too many different beliefs to see Pip—or any other character—in quite the same way. Same words, same pages. Different us. Sometimes different me. I find that my Pip today is not my Pip of yesterday. As I've changed over the years, I find that my thinking about characters has changed as well... —Thomas C. Foster

So what I bring to the table as a reader changes. A lot. That said, I come from an educational background steeped in history and international literature, that influences a lot of my reading choices and the things that I look for in a "good" book. I tend to prefer logic over emotion, which is why I can find family dramas challenging. If a book is poorly edited, has poor grammar, or is offensive, I might pan it, but otherwise I feel most books have an audience and usually it's not me. I mean millions of people will like a book that I just can't enjoy. But I put the onus on me to find the books and authors that will resonate with me, and not expect all authors to write with me in mind. :-) Over the years I've become better at choosing the right book at the right time, so I usually only have a couple of books a year that fall below the three star threshold.

I guess I read intensely, closely, analytically, and for hours at a stretch. I can find a book very immersive and satisfying, and still provide a fairly dispassionate assessment how "good" it is when held to a variety of critical standards.

Possibly teaching lit does that. You're making mental lesson plans for everything you read.

I very rarely don't finish a book, maybe because I read on two levels. Even if the book doesn't grab me, the analytical exercise does. I've also had to teach books I don't like ("The Scarlet Letter"), so reading a book I'm not enjoying isn't that much of a chore because it's fun to try to dissect it.

Would be interested if others find something similar.

I read purely for enjoyment when I was working. I was a frustrated English Lit Student. I went to University and took a course in Economics, which I hated and never finished. I had enjoyed English literature classes in school, but the advice I was given and that I accepted, was that I should do something more useful at University. I had in the back of my mind that I would take up English literature again at some point in my life. When I was fifty I did an open University course in literature and realised I should have continued this after school. I have no regrets about this, but it does now inform my book choices. I am I suppose making up for lost time. Getting involved in LibraryThing has concentrated my thoughts on the books I read and encouraged me to write reviews, which I enjoy doing.

So that's my background, as to whether it has helped me to make a good reading choice, I am not so sure. I certainly now have more information at my fingertips, read more reviews, searches on the internet, but I choose to read chronologically as it puts the good books into perspective. I read plenty of books that probably do not interest other people, some of which I have to admit are probably not worth reading. I like to be surprised and finding a diamond in the rough keeps me going.

I cannot be accused of reading fashionable books and that is probably why I stopped getting involved in Book clubs. My choice of books are also governed by my prejudices. I do not to read many contemporary novels and in my advanced years tend to be more squeamish about violence. I maybe therefore missing out on many good books, but as we all know we cannot read everything.

QUESTION 3: Your Reading Background

I'm sure it is important to know what preconceptions and prejudices we bring to a book, and I'm also pretty sure that however analytic we are, the combined efforts of Marx and Freud will ensure that we never quite take into account all of them. Something is always going to creep in from that pernickety subconscious or that sneaky dominant ideology.

As someone who started out as an uncritical reader of cereal packets, jam labels and the upside-down half of the newspaper (three important genres of fiction...) and moved on to being trained at various different academic levels to read like a literary scholar, a linguist, a scientist or a lawyer (none of whom quite believe that there is a true distinction between fiction and non-fiction), I probably ought to be better than most at filtering out the superstructure, but I don't think I really am. In real life we're lazy, and without the challenge of defending our reading of a text in a seminar or a court hearing, we take short-cuts. My reviews here on LT and my comments around the table in our book-club are not likely to be attacked for lacking detailed footnotes, and I can airily throw in unsupported references (see the mention of Marx and Freud above) without anyone alerting me to it, unless I happen to say something that steps on some other reader's toe. And of course I know that a context like LT has a tendency to bring out my instinct to be the class clown, but that doesn't stop me putting silly jokes into reviews instead of saying something more meaningful.

I agree with >150 labfs39: about the distraction of avoidable errors (I try to remain calm and collected when I see the word "epicentre" in a non-geological context...). I also rather share the experience of >151 nohrt4me2: in enjoying working out why a book is "bad" (or perhaps "imperfect"). I'm not good at disliking things that are merely undistinguished, and I find it troubling when I dislike something that is clearly "good" writing — see the recent discussion about my experience with Red Sorghum.

>150 labfs39: I think that would be Q4, actually :)

QUESTION 3: Distractions

What counts as reading distractions for you in addition to the above mentioned internet? Anything that's not reading?

The first thing that came to mind when I read this question was birds. I've gotten into birding, and the sound or sight of birds outside my window or on the balcony draws my attention from whatever else I'm doing pretty consistently. I made things even more distracting for myself a couple weeks ago or so by hanging bird feeders on the balcony. I love having them there, of course. But the increased bird activity is certainly a distraction, albeit a welcome one.

I also have ADHD, which means I have difficulty filtering. I generally can't concentrate on reading if there's an audible conversation in the room, be it between actual people or on TV/radio/what-have-you. The general buzz of multiple conversations at a place like a cafe is fine, so long as none of the conversations is distinct enough to make out.

I can read with music on, sometimes, but only if there are no lyrics (tv/movie scores, classical, etc). And even that can be a no-go if it's too late in the day, or I've got too much on my mind, or the tone of the music is too at odds with the tone of the book.

Luckily, I live alone, so there's nobody else to talk or turn the TV or anything else on when I want to read. :)

I can also be distracted by things on my mind. Though again, the level of difficulty that causes fluctuates depending on multiple factors, like whether there's anything else impacting my concentration (like noises from outside), and how engrossing the book is.

Are distractions actual interruptions in the reading process, or just a minor annoyance?

That really depends on too many factors to have a single answer - what is it that's distracting me? Can I make it go away? How distracting is it? How engrossing is the book?

How do you deal with them while reading? Are you able to create your own little reading cocoon in the midst of chaos, or do you require total silence?

Again, this depends on a number of factors, including the ones I just listed.

The more engrossing the book, the easier it is for me to focus on it without getting distracted. The annoying thing is that how engrossing a book is or isn't does not correlate with how interested I am in it/how much I want to read it.

I'm really enjoying the nonfiction book on bird migration I'm reading at the moment, for example, but it's not engrossing enough to block out the rest of the world. Whereas I was so engrossed in one of Jennifer McMahon's suspense novels once that I missed several phone calls and didn't notice myself getting hungry while reading it all day. I didn't like the suspense novel better than the bird book - but it was more engrossing.

We all know what airplane reads are. Is there a ranking of circumstances in your mind for reading different kinds of books? Do you find some kinds of reading are missing entirely strictly due to not having the optimum situation for the read?

Some books require longer stretches of uninterrupted time than others. But other than that, I can't think of anything.

What would be on your bookshelf if xyz had never been invented, or happened, or wandered into the room?

I've got nothing for this one, I'm afraid.

QUESTION 3: Your Reading Background

How well do we recognize what we as readers bring to a book? Is it important to know what this background is?

My own self recognition is limited. It’s obviously only important to me, but it’s important when i want to figure out my response. I tend to try to imagine I understand an author (which is probably about as successful as, in my current read, the author talks about how well we can imagine being an eel.) Through this i tend to convince myself I understand what an author is doing or has done far better than is reasonable to suppose. There is an element of the human link and huge chunk of imagined (also human) knowing. I can’t help thinking I’ve got it right, that I sense the author’s sighs and exasperations, and weariness and practicality and renegotiations with their work. And I can’t know how wrong I am without first being in that state and later passing on to a different state of thinking I got it right differently.

Does knowing your reading-self help you distinguish between a "bad" book and what is merely a "bad book choice" for you that may be just right for someone else?

Tricky because of moods and because i’m sometimes wide open to a book that works the emotions and sometimes closed to one that clearly has touched something meaningful. So shallow and deep are inconsistent scaled. And books do lots of different unanticipated and unrecognized things. So what’s good works. What’s good but not enjoyed is something I imagine I understand on a non-emotional level. And what’s bad doesn’t work. Which is not very helpful to other readers.

It does bring up in my mind awards, and second rate books that win them. And those wonderful books that get overlooked. And the fact that these adjectives are subjective. I think books that win awards connect with the award group’s unknown pre-expectations. I think award committees are too stressed and too colleague-conscious to get beyond that. (I read the Booker longlist partially because I’ve learned it contains books i like a lot more than the Booker winner.)

>153 thorold: "the upside-down half of the newspaper ( . . . important genres of fiction...)"

I think you just gave Michael Chabon the idea for his next novel.

QUESTION 3: Your Reading Background

How well do we recognize what we as readers bring to a book? Is it important to know what this background is?
I have a life-long love of reading, as I would imagine most of us here have as well, so I am pre-wired to lie the books I read. However, having become much more aware of, in particular, issues of gender and race over the years, my current reading self is much more aware of misogyny and racism, either subtle or over, in my reading than my younger self used to be. And not just in my reading, of course.

But also, I have studied fiction writing on a relatively limited basis (MA in Creative Writing 30 years ago) and made my living both writing (not fiction, other than for my own edification) and teaching English. Perhaps because of that, I am sometimes painfully conscious of what to me is bad writing on a sentence and paragraph level. When writing is full of cliches, after a while I feel like each one is a poke in the eye. This mostly comes up with selections for my reading group, where what the rest of the group enjoys as a "good story," I hate as a book full of hatefully bad craft. Yes, I'm talking to you, Lincoln Highway. On the other hand, sometimes being able to appreciate writing craft allows me to better enjoy particular books/stories. (I should note that I'm not saying that any of this requires having studied writing or written for a living, but it's the source of these things for me.)

Does knowing your reading-self help you distinguish between a "bad" book and what is merely a "bad book choice" for you that may be just right for someone else?

I used to find myself astounded by other people's ability to enjoy a book that I feel is clearly bad. Now I've learned that there is no telling what people will enjoy and why, or what clear (to me!) flaws they're able/willing to overlook or that go unnoticed. So, to put it another way, in my experience, every book may be just right for someone else. Some people care about ridiculous plotting or unrealistic characterizations, some people don't. Waddaya gonna do?

One thing I love about LT is that here I find discerning readers. That doesn't mean that everybody agrees on such things all the time. Of course we don't. But I do find folks' explanations about why they like or don't like particular books to be articulate and satisfying, even when I don't agree with them.

My reading self is not always as smart as he thinks he is, and that's also something I'm aware of.

>153 thorold: That first line in your second paragraph made me laugh...because I did the same.

QUESTION 3

Each of us approaches any given book with our own individual reading background.

How well do we recognize what we as readers bring to a book? Is it important to know what this background is?

I think we all have a lot of unconscious background that we don't really realize until/unless we look back and see patterns in our reactions to things. For me, I've realized I am not a particularly "deep" reader. This doesn't mean I read only "light" books, because in fact I rarely read those. But it does mean that I prefer to just read, not think about the philosophy of it all or whatever. In the last year or so I read a couple of books that actually made me stop and say "hey, this is an allegory" to myself, and that's notable because it's not something the level on which I'm normally thinking while I'm reading. (Which means it must have been really obvious!)

Does knowing your reading-self help you distinguish between a "bad" book and what is merely a "bad book choice" for you that may be just right for someone else?

I might say something is objectively bad, but even then it doesn't mean someone else might enjoy it. Maybe the simple writing and cardboard characterizations are just the thing for reading at a stressful period in life, who knows? But aside from that, because of my reader profile I am probably going to consider a book "bad" if you have to have a lot of extra information to enjoy anything at all about it. For example, would I have enjoyed Anna Karenina more if I had understood more about agrarian reform in Russia? Maybe. But could I read it and get something out of it without that? Yep. (Morgan just asked me if I thought one could get something out of Ulysses without extra information, since it was written to be picked apart. Interesting question, and we read it with lots of supplementary material. But still, I think you can get something out of it without that. What you get may be more about specific scenes and writing style and that sort of thing, but it's not like there aren't any more surface-level aspects to glean from it.)

>149 SassyLassy:

These days what I bring is mostly a sense of "déjà lu". Long gone are the days when introduction to a new form, new style, daring language shook my world (the upside to this is that presumably society as a whole can finally give up on the eternal idea that "decadence" is upon us--culture survived Georges Sand and Eliot, Jarry, Dada, Joyce, Ionesco, Beckett, Henry Miller, Stravinsky...)

I suppose this is why I read more non-fiction. Familiarity annoys, but ignorance is bottomless.

Im not sure I can answer this question Im reading others' responses but not quite sure how to answer this. What do you mean by a reading self ? What background are you talking about ? and I guess I don't know what you mean by what the reader brings to a book. Sorry for being thick; can someone help me out here?

>160 cindydavid4: A novel doesn't change from reader to reader...it's the same text for each of us. What is different is what you or I bring to the reading of the book. Those things are perhaps our general personality, our education & work experiences, our life experiences, all the other books we've read.... These are the kind of things that may also affect our choice of reading. For example, Being a woman I might get something different out a book than my husband would. I'm also an empathetic person and I am attracted to authors who seem to infuse their novels with empathy (it's a small list :-). I grew up in Maine just up the hill from the ocean and that history probably has something to do with my "thing" for the literature of the Canadian maritimes.

In a book group, each of the members read the same book and will likely understand the book the same, generally...but the members are also individuals and will come to the discussion also with their differing observations (which is, of course, what a good book group should)

Does this help at all? If not, I suggest just letting it go and move on.

161>Those things are perhaps our general personality, our education & work experiences, our life experiences, all the other books we've read.... These are the kind of things that may also affect our choice of reading.

well for me its all of those. But Im going to just let it go, and enjoy reading how others respomded

QUESTION 3 Add-on (I did say there would be more later)

As our reading experience and so our reading background develops, are we more or less open to literary experience than when we were younger? Does that potential "wow" impact diminish, or is it now refined through more critical and wider reading?

Can our reading history and background limit what we read now and in the future, meaning are we less open to new kinds of reading?

>163 SassyLassy:

Q3 Add-on

I think habit formation is real and probably the most limiting factor in what one chooses to read as one gets older. (Not a problem--just saying.)

I'm not sure what "new kinds of reading" may be. The medium is important to me (paper books please), but I can envisage using audio and e-books should I need to. I'm not attracted to the idea of reading Tolstoy rendered entirely in emoji, but a poem, something short, maybe?

As for openness... I'd like to think that hasn't changed, that initial readiness to take up anything. But what has gone is the child's ability to put the worst dross to useful purpose. With experience comes judgement and I at least just can't immerse myself into a badly written work as I could at twelve.

Can our reading history and background limit what we read now and in the future, meaning are we less open to new kinds of reading?

This strikes me as an age question at heart: Has our reading history put us in a rut that we don't want to get out of?

At 70, I'd say we all age differently as readers.

I am much more likely not to want to waste time with certain authors I have dipped into in the past, either because I don't have the intellectual chops to understand them or the temperament to enjoy them.

But I don't think I have read myself into a rut. I will take risks on genre fiction, the experimental, the transgressive, and things outside my own time-space continuum. Some of these risks pay off, some don't, but that's sorta what risk is about.

I used to read things my students told me about (yes, the whole damn "Twilight" series and two George RR Martins for which I want a medal of some kind) with a certain sociological interest, even though I didn't really enjoy them as entertainment.

I'd say I have a stronger sense of my own preferences and aesthetic limitations than I did at 25. But I no longer see myself as the critical arbiter of the universe.

Can our reading history and background limit what we read now and in the future, meaning are we less open to new kinds of reading?

One wonders what constitutes "new kind of reading" -- a different genre? different style? a different delivery system? different focus...

I've done a lot of exploring over the decades -- literature . It's been an adventure and I still like adventures (I retain an innate, persistent sense of curiosity!)... However, I have slowed down some; I read somewhat less. I no longer finish substandard books or a book that I'm not connecting with (life is too short!). I still tend to want to read most of the work of an author I connect with on some level. I probably read very little of the younger generations (but I haven't done a study on that yet) Still read nonfiction and poetry....

Recently, and strangely, I find myself unable to read all the way through a police procedural, a genre I have been reading since my children were small in the 80s (when it was often the only kind of book I could get through)

I agree with nohrt4me> I'd say I have a stronger sense of my own preferences and aesthetic limitations than I did at 25.

QUESTION 3 Add-on

As our reading experience and so our reading background develops, are we more or less open to literary experience than when we were younger? Does that potential "wow" impact diminish, or is it now refined through more critical and wider reading?

The wow impact is harder and harder to find. Some is age, and some is that things that wowed me then are now familiar.

Can our reading history and background limit what we read now and in the future, meaning are we less open to new kinds of reading?

I like to imagine that my reading history propels to me to be more selective in my reading. For example, I don't read thrillers. It's not that I have read so many that they don't do anything for me. But I read a few way back when, and I found that they weren't where I wanted to spend my reading time. I'm not sure I would call that a limit. I'm less open to stuff the resembles aspects of stuff I didn't like in the past. Hopefully that's a good thing.

Q3 Add-on

When I was in high school, I was driven to read everything I thought I should have read or that was a classic, to compensate for my horrible education. Looking back, it's amusing to think about some of the books that I thought fell into these categories. Over time I've become more selective in what I read, aiming for quality and/or entertainment, rather than what I "should" read. So while that may limit my choices in a certain sense, I don't feel that I've closed myself off to new kinds of reading. As an adult I've discovered graphic novels, e-books, and loads of international literature. Like much in life, the "wow" factor has become more subtle, but I can still get blown away by a book.

>149 SassyLassy:
Q3 -- Your reading background
I have more specific preferences for books vs audiobooks, but I generally read to escape into the book-world. I'm pretty fiction-centered. My favorite genres are magical realism, murder on a windswept island, horror, and (my absolute favorite) books-I've-already-read.

I do like some amount of analyzing while I read, but to read a book that fully requires it I have to have the right mental conditions. Most of the time I just want to be carried away by my imagination. When I'm feeling really productive and mentally healthy, though, I often try for some more thoughtful stuff.

With audiobooks I'll read a broader range. If it has rich detail and a good atmosphere, I will probably go for it.

One weird "bad book choice" for me tends to be sci-fi (I love Star Trek, don't get me wrong).
It really seems like I should like sci-fi, but I never seek it out and I'm very picky with it. I don't know, it's just one of those things.

+ Add on:
I think I've gotten more selective. I used to grab anything that looked good and return from the library with a stack of 13 books, and I'd often enjoy most-if-not-all of them. I definitely still prefer the same genres, but I have a harder time finding something I really, really like. I still read and enjoy a lot, but the amount that I re-read has gone up, and I pay more attention to authors. Granted, I'm only 20, so this will probably change quite a bit.

>164 LolaWalser: Your thoughts about openness and a child's ability to read bad writing reminds me of experiences I've had with my friends. I've tried and failed to read books recommended to me from their childhoods, and I had a hard time explaining why I wouldn't finish a beloved book series they loaned me, etc. Vice versa has happened, where my children's or young adult/YA book recommendations have fallen short with friends who've said they just couldn't get into it.

There are a lot of children's and YA books that I still re-read and enjoy because I first loved them when I was younger, but probably wouldn't enjoy if I read for the first time now, and I think that nostalgia and that initial read with an inexperienced perspective puts in a lot of work.

QUESTION 3 Add-on

As our reading experience and so our reading background develops, are we more or less open to literary experience than when we were younger? Does that potential "wow" impact diminish, or is it now refined through more critical and wider reading?

Difficult to say. Everyone else I know seems to have become more conservative in their tastes and less open to new stuff (not just in reading) as they got older, so I assume I must have too, but I’m not conscious of it. I don’t suppose other people are, either. I still keep finding new things I want to explore, more than I actually have time for, even though (in theory) I have more time for it now. But maybe those new things are also being filtered more aggressively before they get on the task-list?

When the Harry Potter books, Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman were the big things younger people were talking about, I took the time to go and read them, even though I knew they weren’t really going to be my kind of thing: I don’t seem to do that any more. Less contact with young people, or a sense that life is too short? I don’t know.

There probably is less “wow” factor, too. I’m better prepared for what I read, I have generally selected it from a reasonably well-informed position, I’ve prepared for reading it, and I have a lot of context to put it in, so I don’t get quite that sense of astonishment I got from taking my first Zola off the library shelf because someone had mentioned his name at school (we didn’t have Wikipedia in those days!).

But — I hope — I’m now much better equipped to appreciate the detail of what the author is doing, and the background to why they were doing it and why it matters.

I think there are a lot of things I read “now” that I wouldn’t have ventured into “then” — for instance, I’m much more open to non-fiction in the humanities and social sciences than I was, especially history, I read more in languages other than English (I didn’t even get confident enough to read Spanish novels until about seven or eight years ago), and I chase up obscure stuff I wouldn’t have known how to find back in the day.

QUESTION 3 Add-on As our reading experience and so our reading background develops, are we more or less open to literary experience than when we were younger? Does that potential "wow" impact diminish, or is it now refined through more critical and wider reading?

I cant say Ive ever not been open to "literary experince"* , Ive always been curious for different books and genres. And I still follow the daisy chain of book selection Ill read a fiction about a topic,which leads to wanting to find out more by maybe reading a non fiction or another book about the topic with a diffferent viewpoint. I stiil have "wow" moments, (see my reviews for haven and babel however Im much more picky about my reads and i certainly am more critical. I know my curiousity has gotten me to expand into translated works much more than before

* not sure what this means in this context

Tangential to the discussion re dwindling "wow" factor: A bit in the newspaper noted that a study shows that your first bite of (insert favorite food here) is always the best, and enjoyment throughout the meal diminishes slightly after that. If you are served only excellent batches of (insert favorite food), your enjoyment diminishes even more. You get bored. A few blah batches might improve your enjoyment when you get back to the good stuff.

So maybe those of us willing to endure the substandard (to us) books are enjoying the good stuff more.

>173 nohrt4me2: interesting philosophy! You might be on to something

Q3 Distractions
I can't read with words in the background - music, or TV, or people talking close to me (the last is most manageable, but I'm still likely to surface and pay more attention to the conversation than the book repeatedly). Noise without words doesn't bother me at all, and a very engrossing book can make me miss conversations even aimed at me. Now that I mostly read on my phone, I can and have read standing up in a line with conversations around me, or in a waiting room with TV running - I don't go deep, especially since it's usually not a long period for reading, but I can read and remember what I read.

I mostly deal with distractions by ignoring them - if it's a task I have to do, it's not a distraction it's just a thing. So I do it and go back to reading when I get the chance.

I do tend to pick lighter (requiring less thought) books for trips - mostly because when I take a trip it's with family or friends, I'll be doing stuff and talking and spending time doing things other than reading, so I don't want, say, a complex non-fiction that needs long stretches of uninterrupted deep reading. Since, again, I mostly read on my phone, I can carry a few hundred books and pick up the one that works for me in the moment. I do sometimes take small books on trips - paperbacks that I intend to read and discard, and if I finish them I'll discard them at the destination. But increasingly they sit unread while I read on my phone, and then I have to carry them back home...

If ebooks had not been invented, there would be more books on my shelves...aghh, no, not more! I have too many now. But then, I'd be reading them and could discard the ones that I don't want to reread. Currently they just sit on shelves and in boxes...and I have e-copies of most of the books I really want to reread.

Q3 (4?) Reading self
My reading self is very intolerant of grammar and spelling errors - and especially spell-checker errors, they drive me nuts (it's a word, it's just not the word intended. At all). But it's a balance. There are very good books riddled with errors - and I will note every one, and keep on reading. There are books that are, in addition to grammar and spelling errors, poorly written - I've done a few reviews that say "this would be really good writing...for a high school student. Should not have been published in this form". And I think I've come across a few that are well-edited but poorly written (unreal dialog, lack of description, deus ex machina every time the characters run into a difficulty - or constant difficulties that a moment's thought by the characters would have cleared up in advance, but the author wanted "action"). Mostly I don't notice the good editing because I can't finish the book.

I formed an opinion that I hated "literary fiction" in...high school, I think (blame Tess of the D'Urbervilles, among others). I have read a few books that were marketed as literary fiction and loved them, since; I have read (or started to read) a great many others that confirmed me in my dislike. So I continue to avoid literary fiction as much as possible. Another I avoid is horror. I've recently (in the last decade) found an author who can write horror that works for me, as opposed to horror that makes me go "ew, no, done" (it's Ursula Vernon). She's gotten me to try a few others, both classic horror (that she's written a version of) and current writers with that kind of slant - but no one else has had the right angle for me.

I often review a book "not for me" - meaning, for whatever reason, this story does not work for me but I can see that others would like it. In a few cases, the book has been one that I loved before - and it's not for me any more (this has been true of several childrens/YA series). And in some cases, I think the book's OK - not great, not bad - but can see how others, particularly children, might fall in love with it. Huh. I guess that's the Wow factor, sort of - there are books that were serious Wows for me as a kid that I still love, and books that are described as Wows that I didn't read until I was an adult and they're nice but nothing special. I still come across a Wow now and then - not many, but a few. And often I don't realize how much of a Wow they are until a few months later when I'm still thinking of them, and seeing them in other books and in my life, and wanting to reread or read more about those characters - I mean, I knew I liked the book, but there are books I enjoy and a month later I can't remember that I read them, and there are ones that become part of my life (and my reading self!).

>176 jjmcgaffey: Lack of editing at all levels has become a whole new problem in communication and publishing. This morning I read something like: "He had an eye for cooking great meals." I also heard someone on a broadcast say that tuberculosis was serious in the 1930s because "there was no vaccine for TB."

>173 nohrt4me2: That is why its suggested that when you eat, you do it slowly,and enjoy those first bites. Supposedly that also help you stop eating when it doesnt taste as good. However, Ive never had my enjoyment diminish with chocolate! I dont need any blah batches! but thats just me

Kansas City Library parking garage from bookstr.com

QUESTION 4: Reading in 'A Big Way'

One of the newer members of Club Read recently asked a question about reading for the future, about books to reflect on through life*. Which books would you recommend to someone starting to read in "A Big Way"? Which books have stuck with you throughout your life? Which have shaped your attitudes, your understanding, and your reading? In other words, and quoting, "What, in your view, should I absolutely not wait to take on?"

* As LolaWalser says This means books rich enough to reveal life no matter how many times we read them

Question 4: Which books will shape your life in a Big Way, that are rich enough to reveal life no matter of many times we read them?

I'm old, and I confess that the well has gone dry on The Once and Future King and Jane Austen, some of William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Kurt Vonnegut, and Henry James.

Those were once books/authors I re-read a lot, and some I still do, but not as much as I used to. I wonder if anybody else over 50 or 60 has got to that point with favorite books. Where are the books that shape our lives after middle age? I like Vita Sackville West's All Passion Spent as a reflection of extreme age and acceptance of death.

FWIW, I find the Psalter in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer a source of enduring interest, humankind's attempt to communicate with the concept of a creator, if you will. Not promoting religious belief here. But I like the way the Episcopalians translated the Psalms, and, in terms of the imagery, symbolism, and levels of meaning they resonate quite a lot in Western literature (including America Western genre fiction, with its deserts, cattle, serpents, storms, etc. ...).

I also like Beowulf in its Old English original because it brings to bear literature, linguistics, archaeology, paleography, history, and other disciplines. Today, for instance, I had an interesting discussion with someone about what "mearcstapa" actually means. The word only appears in Beowulf and refers only to Grendel. It could be translated poetically as "marsh stalker," but it literally means to "mark stepper," which could mean someone who patrols a border, an interloper who lurks around a boundary, or even somebody who "crosses a line." In the Anglo-Norman period, there were the Lords of the Mark, who guarded the Welsh border, and I think that's where we get the Frenchified title, "marquis." See? Fun, fun, fun.

>180 nohrt4me2: cool about mearcstapa and the mark

>179 SassyLassy: goodness. I’m too intimidated by the stakes of “in a big way”. I may not have read the right answer to that question yet. Iliad? Odyssey? Job? Divine Comedy? Shakespeare (but which plays? Hamlet and Midsummer Night’s Dream?) Pride and Prejudice? Beyond that i’m flat unsure. But if you read those in a vacuum they would suffocate and die.

>181 dchaikin: Beowulf maybe hasn't shaped my life, but it has kept me interested for about 55 years. So there's that.

You make an interesting point about "reading in a vacuum." Maybe there are some books that shape our taste (if not our very lives) for all time, touchstones of style or theme that provide a kind of measure for other things we read. Sense and Sensibility would be one of mine, even though I am now Mrs. Jennings and not Marianne Dashwood, who needs to learn lessons about handsome but shallow men.

I have to say In Cold Blood was a revelation of narrative style. Another touchstone, but I could not read that book again.

Enough outta me.

>180 nohrt4me2:

Great post. And I don't think mentioning sacred literature is out of place--if anything, I'd be surprised if it weren't prevalent on the whole. Even for some non-religious folk.

>181 dchaikin:

I think you may be taking the wrong tack, Dan. As I understand it, it's not about picking some "worthy" tome to work its magic on you, but identifying whatever HAS worked its magic in your life (maybe often, maybe still, maybe no matter how many times you take it up). If it's Schulz's Peanuts, so be it. :)

ETA: "Peanuts" is actually one of my "Permanents", at least whatever I accumulated as a youngster.

But I'll post a full answer later.

Mrs Miniver is the first one that springs to mind. But that's not in a big way, it's in...appreciating the small things, sort of.

There are whole universes that live in my head - Narnia, the Liadens, Star Trek, more recently the Empire of Astalandas...they give me viewpoints I might not have had otherwise. But I don't think they really shaped my life...or they did, but only in that they lead me to other reading adventures. Reading, the act of it, has shaped my life, but I can't think of any individual book that's done so.

>183 LolaWalser: the problem is magic has a time stamp, perhaps like a maturation date. What won me over at one time is not what I necessarily want to revisit or even like anymore. It might just have been a book that hit it me at the right time.

>185 dchaikin: "the problem is magic has a time stamp, perhaps like a maturation date." I love that, Dan; so true.

>185 dchaikin: I agree. Jane Austen continued to be interesting/revelatory into middle age because of her wonderful minor characters who were older and often interestingly flawed. I still appreciate her and her place in literature. But the transformative properties of the book have expired for me.

Quoting the original question, as there seem to be accumulating different interpretations of what was asked:

>179 SassyLassy:

Which books would you recommend to someone starting to read in "A Big Way"? Which books have stuck with you throughout your life? Which have shaped your attitudes, your understanding, and your reading?

First, the recommendations are based on personal experience and reflect that only.

My "permanents" include (random order):

Montaigne

The thousand nights and one night in the Mardrus translation, containing Powys Mathers' fake but lovely Arabic poetry

The Dhammapada and The Bhagavad gita--I read the former in the old Penguin edition and the latter in several, no particular recommendations as I'm far from expert on this, I'd say go with the Penguins

Il fu Mattia Pascal and Uno, nessuno e centomila, Pirandello--in fact practically everything by him

R. H. Blyth's four-volume edition of Haiku--easier to get at through the author touchstone I presume--this was a recommendation I picked up from one of Salinger's books, one of many in fact, from

Franny & Zooey, Salinger --there's a list of quotations written on the walls or doorways in the Glass children's room

Wonderful life and Full house, Stephen Jay Gould (regardless of later technical emendations of the Burgess Shale discoveries)

Lewis Carroll's Alice books + The hunting of the Snark. I went through a phase of complete obsession with Carroll where I read not just everything he had published (including the math books) but his entire diaries (well, such as published), and lemme tell you--as diaries go, those were a wonder of monotony. I can read Alice anytime anywhere with complete absorption. It could be a medical condition.

removed because the description on the site is awful!

Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, two stoical comrades from the year I first had my heart broken, at 19 (and how I hate to see them coopted by this inceloid scum today...)

Complete Dostoevsky

Complete Shakespeare

Ovid -- The metamorphoses and the Ars amatoria

Complete Oscar Wilde

Andersen, Grimm, Perrault

The tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu

The pillow book, Sei Shonagon

Essays in idleness, Kenko

Saigyo and Han Shan, two mountain hermits

All Corto Maltese books by Hugo Pratt

All Asterix from the Goscinny era

Van Gogh's Letters to his brother Theo

Complete Greek theatre, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes

Complete Saki

Les liaisons dangereuses, Laclos

Complete Catullus and Martial

Essays in Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki (another from the Salinger list...)

Il deserto dei Tartari, Buzzati

A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust

Complete Kafka

The sayings of Rabi'a al-Adawia

George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Walt Kelly's Pogo comics

and there's more

>188 LolaWalser: Fabulous list and always happy to see Pogo

QUESTION 5: Charts and Graphs Round 2 - You vs LT

Ever wonder how many LT people have libraries like yours and where yours differs?
Charts and Graphs has thoughtfully provided you with this info, breaking it down by genre.

Looking at your Charts and Graphs page there is a bar graph for genres under 'Site vs Member'.

Does yours reflect what you would have anticipated, or are there huge differences?

Where do you differ most from LT? Where do you differ most from what you expected?

Are any of LT's categories missing from your library? If so, which ones?

Feel free to post your own bar graph.

Does yours reflect what you would have anticipated, or are there huge differences?

As expected, except that (1) I apparently only have one book of recent fiction. I wonder how recent is recent. And (2) why no general fiction or literary or classics?

Where do you differ most from LT? Where do you differ most from what you expected?

I’m a lot lower than LT in: fantasy, horror, mystery, science fiction, suspense and thrillers, young adult, philosophy and Religion and Spirituality. So all genres.

I’m a lot higher than LT in: childrens’s, Art and Design and Travel.

Are any of LT's categories missing from your library? If so, which ones?

Oddly, recent fiction

QUESTION 5: Charts and Graphs Round 2 - You vs LT

I think I might have been partly responsible for this one — I posted my chart over on my own thread a little while ago. To avoid redundancy, I'll try to recast what I said then and see if something new comes out with the benefit of a bit of extra thinking time:

Does yours reflect what you would have anticipated, or are there huge differences?
On the whole, it's a surprisingly unsurprising set of figures, given what the genre categories are. I didn't expect something so broad-brush to give something that is almost a recognisable picture of what I would have thought the main oddities of my library are. Obviously there are details it doesn't pick up because there are sub-genres that aren't taken into account (literary criticism, social science, music, language, ...), and a few surprises where everyone else isn't behaving in quite the way my stereotype of the "average LT user" would have predicted.

Of course, the real elephant in the room is the ultra-vague "not otherwise provided for" genre of General Fiction, invisible on the chart, but actually accounting for 2329 books, about half my library. And presumably about the same proportion for other people. Most of the dramatic differences in the chart don't relate to more than a few tens of books...

Where do you differ most from LT? Where do you differ most from what you expected?

I'm noticeably below the average proportion among LT members for Religion & Spirituality, Children's Books, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Young Adult, Graphic Novels & Comics, Art & Design.
— I was expecting Children's Books, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Young Adult, Graphic Novels & Comics to be low, as those are genres that don't really interest me much, and what I have is mostly left over from childhood, which was a long time ago, and a stage in my life where my real-terms book-buying budget was rather lower than it is now.
— Religion & Spirituality and Art & Design were a slight surprise. I don't have many books in those genres, but there's a shelf or two at least. Presumably there must be a lot of people who have a shelf or two of Religion & Spirituality and nothing else (or church libraries skewing the data?).

Other categories where I'm low but the average proportion is fairly low too include Business, Home & Garden, Food & Cooking — none of them categories where I read much.

I'm noticeably above the average for Travel, Poetry, and LGBTQ+
— Nothing surprising there: those are all categories in which I actively seek out books. Poetry and LGBTQ+ are things you would expect to be minority interests.
— But it is surprising how low Travel is in the site-wide numbers: it's at 1.5% where Poetry is at 2.1%. I've always thought of it as a very popular genre, that tends to take up quite a lot of space in bookshops. I wonder what's going on?
— I was surprised to be slightly above the average in Sports & Leisure, since I have essentially no interest in competitive sport, and I certainly don't have shelves and shelves of footballers' memoirs. But it turns out that it's picking up a lot of walking and cycling books, which is fair enough.
— Technology (above average) and Science & Nature (below average) were a bit of a puzzle, but it looks as though the Technology category is picking up some of my (many) railway and engineering history books, but the Science & Nature category isn't picking up many of my old science textbooks. Both probably need a lot of cleaning up to make sense.

Are any of LT's categories missing from your library? If so, which ones?

There aren't any zero values. Health & wellness and Recent fiction have one book each, but those are the bottom genres for the site as a whole. The latter seems to be an artefact: possibly "recent" is defined too narrowly, since the average per member is only 0.03%. The book in Health & wellness is a vegetarian cookery book, which doesn't really seem to need or fit that genre. But I'm not really sure what you would find there: it's a pretty sparse genre for average members as well.

>190 SassyLassy:
QUESTION 5: Charts and Graphs Round 2 - You vs LT
Not too shocking, but I was surprised by how high my fantasy bar is! I guess I didn't realize how much of what I read is classified as fantasy, because I read more magical-realism-type fantasy than high fantasy.

I am missing quite a lot of LT's categories (My LT library only covers 11 different genres), probably because I only read fiction, but also probably because I have only been updating my library in here for books in the past year of my reading, and that is such a small portion of my reading life.

Other categories that are high for me are Horror, Mystery, LGBTQ+, Suspense and Thriller, and, surprisingly, Historical Fiction and Romance. I don't actively seek out books in those last two categories, so I was a bit surprised to see that they are so up there (I am very picky with and sometimes avoid Historical Fiction).

>190 SassyLassy: QUESTION 5: Charts and Graphs Round 2 - You vs LT

Looking only in my Read collection (because the rest is still a random sampling...)

My Mystery and Science Fiction bars are in the stratosphere (especially the first: 41.79% for me vs 6.03% for the site; Science fiction is 17.33%/5.16%) - no much surprise there. Fantasy, Graphic Novels and Suspense & Thriller are trying to catch up - all 3 are also higher the the site percentages: Fantasy is the closest with (11.64%/8.42% for member/site, Suspense/Thriller is 11.48%/3.37% and Graphic Novels is 8.29%/2.78%.

Which won't surprise anyone who had ever seen my threads - as much as I go exploring, these are the genres I tend to always return to. They are also prone to long series and authors writing a book per year (or more).

The closest I have compared to the site are Romance: 5.95% for member; 5.93% for the site - which is statistically the same value and LGBTQ+ (1.17% for both the site and the member graph - ha!). I don't necessarily look for either of these genres but I don't mind them and especially the latter is popular lately in the speculative genres so... Both of these genres' books for me are mostly SF/Fantasy books that are playing double duty.

Historical Fiction popped up higher than I expected it to be (6.96% vs the site 4.84%) but looking at the books, it is a mix of historical mysteries, historical fantasy and pure historical, so it makes sense.

I beat the site by a smidgen on Poetry (2.45% for me, 2.12% for the site), it gets me on all nonfiction genres and on the kids/Teen/YA (although surprisingly I seem to be higher than the site on Tween - which may be my random raids on the juvenile section of the library (mostly the middle grade novels) from the looks of that list.

A lot of the categories at the bottom show a book or 2 only: Travel and Sociology have 1 each; Home & Garden, Christian Fiction and Recent Fiction have 2 each (ignoring the latter because it is weird), Philosophy, Economics and Business are tied at 3 and Technology and Religion & Spirituality at 4. Art & Design is at 6; Children's Books is at 7 (but Kids and Tween are much higher so...). None of these is a surprise (Technology because I just do not read that for fun so don't record it mostly; the rest because I rarely read them).

And here is the graph which looks very squished because of the stratosphere genre :)

Nothing surprising. I have more sci-fi and horror and far less romance than the site. I think people who know me in real life, including my husband, would say that's about right.

>188 LolaWalser: Did you ever read Krazy? Thoughts on it if so?

I'm unusually high on biography & memoir (I do like memoirs, but I didn't think I was all that high), travel (okay, hmmm, I do like to buy travel books I guess), and historical fiction - by a lot - funny, because I don't read this genre much anymore. But it's pretty broad as a category.

I'm unusually low on children's, fantasy, religion & spirituality, and science fiction. Not a huge surprise, but I do have a goodly number of children's and religion, so I think there are some serious power users in those categories who are skewing the stats.

Mine is lots of fantasy, science fiction, and romance (in that order) as the highest over the site. All the young "genres" except Children's Books I'm above the site average (Kids, Teen, Tween, and YA). Well below site average in Religion & Spirituality (not surprising), Biography & Memoir (a little surprising) and History (quite surprising).

Interestingly, the chart is not hugely different between Read (as discussed above) and All Books. The numbers are very different, of course, but everything I said above applies to All Books as well. So it looks like I've got a good library, of books I should enjoy...should get to reading them!

No surprise I have more poetry than anything. Also heavy on mystery, scifi, anthropology and travel. I’m suprised my science & nature genre is lower than others. Business, economics and technology are close to nonexistent.

Update:

Looking at >194 AnnieMod: and >199 dianeham:, I realised that there were some genres I had turned off (I don’t even know what “tween” means, or the difference between “kids” and “children”), so I went to the Genre settings and discovered that there were also some new ones, including the ones whose absence I was bemoaning above!

I’m below average on Christian Fiction (3 books), Economics, Kids, Picture Books (1 book), Suspense & Thriller, Teen and Tween. But none of these are quite zero.

I’m also slightly below average on the new social science genres Anthropology, Sociology and Politics & Government (I have quite a bit of each, but they are obviously swamped by my fiction section, same story as for Religion and Philosophy), but I’m ahead of the curve for the site on both Literature Studies and Music, as expected.

I notice that Hunting & Fishing and Falconry, which exist as genres in the list, don’t appear in the chart, so I assume that LT doesn’t include genres with zero books in the comparison anyway. Maybe someone with a smaller library can verify that. Or maybe those genres were just a test and aren’t even populated: I do have a couple of R S Surtees novels and two books about commercial fishing in my catalogue…

I checked my Tween list: it was packed with irrelevant delights such as Studies in British transport history and Caravanning through Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, which I’ve cleaned up, but was otherwise mostly Arthur Ransome. The Christian Fiction books were two by C S Lewis and one by Georges Bernanos, which seems sensible.

Chart with All Genres turned on:



ETA: On reflection, the figures for “Music” looked a bit high: I checked and found it was picking up a lot of poetry collections that had nothing obvious to do with music — maybe it was taking the “lyric” in “lyric poetry” too literally, or it’s got some poetry publishers down as music publishers? Anyway, in reality I only have 56 books (1.17%) that really belong in the Music genre, just slightly over the site average (which must anyway be swollen by other people who haven’t noticed that half their poetry is also in Music…).

Question 5



I think the main things that surprise me a little are that my stacks for Biography & Memoir and Historical Fiction are so outsized related to the rest of the site. I have a lot more horror than the site at large, but that doesn't surprise me. I guess the big surprise is how tall the site-wide stack is for Religion & Spirituality.

I don't even have a Recent Fiction stack (all genres are turned on), I don't know how that is calculated at all.

I have significantly fewer categories than some of those charts. I'll go see what I can tweak.

>202 Nickelini: same here!

>201 ursula: The one book I have listed in Recent Fiction is Bournville, which came out in October 2022. Maybe it’s books published in the last six months?

>204 thorold: When it came out, that was what Tim defined it as I believe - fiction published in the last 6 months.

Question 5: Charts and Graphs II

Does yours reflect what you would have anticipated, or are there huge differences?
Mine bears pretty much no surprises. My library is much higher than the average in History and Memoir/Biography. Also, in Sports and Leisure, which is also to be expected given my four bulging Baseball shelves. I'm a bit surprised that I'm above the LT average in Mysteries, but that's only by a little: 8.8% to 6%.

Where do you differ most from LT?
Sports & Leisure: 6.95% to 0.81% or 858% higher than average
Music: 3.37% to 1.14% or 296% higher than average
Memoir/Biography: 16.36% to 6.33% or 258% higher than average
History: 21.68% to 9.77% or 222% higher than average

On the opposite end of the scale, I have only about a quarter of the average number of books on Religion and Spirituality. I'm also much lower than LT in Philosophy, Technology, Business and Fantasy. I really don't need a large philosophy book collection since I have all y'all to explain the universe and its wonders to me. :)

Where do you differ most from what you expected?
Pretty much nowhere, I guess.

Are any of LT's categories missing from your library? If so, which ones?
Home & Garden and Health & Wellness are basically no shows for me. The Gardening books are all in my wife's library.

Q5 - charts & graphs
I haven't yet entered all of my e-books but even once I do and the chart gets somewhat diluted, science & nature will still be the extreme outlier, 35% of my books and 10x LT. Everything else pales in comparison, but Biography & Memoir is 3x, History is 2.5x, both over 20% of my books. Others where I have significantly fewer books, but a significantly higher percentage than LT: Home & Garden is 6.5x, Technology is 5x, Art & Design is 2.5x. This is all completely unsurprising. Note though that my catalogue includes only books I currently own plus a few dozen that I've read in recent years but either borrowed or discarded. Several decades are unaccounted for.

>204 thorold:, >205 AnnieMod: Oh okay, I guess that probably tracks. I feel like I read a lot of 2022 books in 2022, but maybe not recent enough in the last few months.

>201 ursula: Historical Fiction appears to include any book set in the past. A WWI book published in 1922 counts; an autobiographical novel published in the 50s counts; a novel set in the 1990s counts. So with the hint provided in >200 thorold:, I've removed 40 (of 200) books from "historical fiction".

>209 ELiz_M: Good to know, but I'm not a fiddler. :) I don't really care about it except as a vague curiosity to answer this question.

>209 ELiz_M: Yes, the “Historical Fiction” category has a lot of noise in it. But I’m also at the point where it’s so big that I can’t be bothered to clean it up. People disagree about what the term “historical fiction” means, anyway: I think a lot of readers are more interested in simply reading about the past than they are in technical questions of how the author deals with a period before their own lifetime.

>211 thorold: eople disagree about what the term “historical fiction” means, anyway: I think a lot of readers are more interested in simply reading about the past than they are in technical questions of how the author deals with a period before their own lifetime.

ulimately for me, this, yes

Yeah. For me, "historical fiction" is the author writing about a period before their own time. So Sutcliff wrote historical fiction and Dickens didn't - he was writing about his own time(ish), even though that's a historical period _now_. Otherwise everything (except possibly science fiction - and you could argue about some of that) immediately becomes historical fiction. But a lot of people seem to think that historical fiction means "written about a time before now".

>213 jjmcgaffey: Dickens does have a historical novel though - The Tale of Two Cities. Other from that, yep - people do use the term all ways of weird.

Looks like the biggest "member vs site" delta for me is in the Biography & Memoir category, with Historical Fiction being second. Not surprising, as I read a lot in those genres. Nor is it surprising that I'm well below the bar on Children's Books, Health & Wellness, and LGTBQ. I see I hand out a lot fewer 5-star ratings and a lot more 3.5 star ones than most LT users.

It’s only marginally relevant, but I did love Tom Gauld’s take on Virginia Woolf and genre last week: https://www.theguardian.com/books/picture/2023/feb/04/tom-gauld-on-advice-from-v...

It's interesting to me how many of those who responded have well above the average number of books in the 'Biography and Memoir' category. Are we a nosier group than others, do we use them as resource and reference material, or could there possibly be something in the classification system that weights it (unlikely)?

>192 thorold: I think I might have been partly responsible for this one Absolutely!

>217 SassyLassy: Looks as though there’s a bit of noise in the Biography & Memoir bucket, with various kinds of subjective travel books, essays, or narrative non-fiction popping up, but probably 80% of what’s in mine is correct.

Most of the (auto-)biographies I read are of writers or composers, so that fits in with the idea of resource and reference, but mere nosiness certainly can’t be ruled out.

>217 SassyLassy: I think it's because we all love well told stories about interesting people, and that's what memoirs and biographies are, at least well done ones.

>190 SassyLassy: QUESTION 5: Charts and Graphs II

This tells me that almost one half of my books come from only three categories: History, Home and Garden, and Politics and Government. That wasn't a surprise. Home and Garden was about 12x the rest of LT.

I was surprised to see that LT thinks I have 20 books on 'Sports and Leisure'. This did not seem very me, so I looked to see what they were. I'm not sure how LT made this determination, but apparently

The August Gales: The Tragic Loss of Fishing Schooners in the North Atlantic, 1926 and 1927
Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland's Saltwater Cowboys - actually about the cod fishing moratorium and its effects - maybe "cowboys" threw it off
The Education of Everett Richardson: The Nova Scotia Fishermen's Strike
Wake of the Great Sealers - the story of men and boys frozen to death on the ice floes in a blizzard while out sealing
Places Lost: In Search of Newfoundland's Resettled Communities - more tragic social history from the era of the provincial government resettling entire communities

are all sporting books. That was a shock.

>220 SassyLassy: I think I've seen that effect before. "Fishing" must be a leisure activity according to the algorithm.

>220 SassyLassy: Many that I would consider to be garden, LT counts as nature & science. I also have some oddities that LT counts as sports & leisure, e.g. bird guides and knots. LT philosophy includes books from a bunch of my categories, e.g. math and evolution and cognition, but I can see how they have a philosophical component. I wondered about Christian fiction... and it's all Narnia.

>220 SassyLassy: LOL. I used to be very good at Trivial Pursuit but would struggle with the orange Sports & Leisure category. The only way I could score any points is when the question was about horse racing or cocktails

>221 thorold: I suspect you are correct - how could "fisheries" and "fishing" possibly be different to an algorithm?!

>222 qebo: After reading this, I had a look at "Home and Garden" vs "Science and Nature" and discovered that quite a few books showed up on both lists.

That got me looking in other categories. Here's the strangest:

The Unholy Hymnal: Terminological Inexactitudes and Delusions Rendered by President Richard M Nixon and Others under - you guessed it - TRAVEL!

>223 Nickelini: That's exactly where I fell down - lots of obscure information, but who won the Super Bowl or the World Cup 8 years ago - who knows?

Time to move on to a new thread.