18. Catalogue your Bookcase with Library Thing

Library quilt by Beedle Um Bum.

Now Library Thing is more 'my thing' but incredibly time consuming! Like my coach I dived in at the deep end and started to use it before reading the literature. I've added 7 of my English language novels automatically downloading them from The British Library. It's nice to see the book covers but they don't correspond to the books I have so I then added a novel manually with date of publication and ISBN number but saw that the book cover displayed still differed from that of my own book. Not that it matters.

It could take some time to catalogue our entire book collection though. My husband and I are real bibliophiles and we have literally hundreds of books in nearly every room in the house. As most of my colleagues know, I studied English literature at University and therefore have a large collection of Classic English novels. My degree also covered Anglo Saxon Literature, Medieval to Restoration drama (including Shakespeare), Poetry (my Romantics lecturer, Andrew Motion was until recently Britain's poet laureate and the poet Philip Larkin was Head Librarian at Hull University Library where I studied)and finally Commonwealth literature including writers like Katherine Mansfield and Patrick White.
Although my husband is a mathematician he also enjoys reading about History, Philosophy and Politics too and has many more books than I do including many classic Dutch novels and books of poetry. He would have had more had he not generously decided to sell part of his collection of Maths books to fund the purchase of curtains for our house when our son was born.

Excuse this fit of nostalgia. I'm not sure I plan to catalogue our entire collection, It would take too long but it will be interesting to read reviews of other readers. Having said that, I am my usual cautious self when it comes to exposing myself to a flood of useless information. For example when searching for reader comments about the works of Austen and Bronte I read that they make one reader 'hurl'( amerikaans voor overgeven!) and another reader quipped that her husband only read Jane Eyre because he wanted to know how Rochester got his wife up into the attic!!

Reader reviews and the ability to recommend books to like minded readers would be a good facility for the library to offer to it's readers and 'reader circles.'

Oh, I forgot to give a link to my "library" and here I have a problem. I've called it 'carolinemaks' but would rather be more anonymous. When I tried to edit it I read the message that this was temporarily not possible. How temporary I wonder? I've also seen that some book covers are duplicated but I've only downloaded them once, honest. How do I delete the duplicates?
Finally, when I searched for both Larkin and Motion in Hull University Library I receieved a message not to panic but that no references could be found which seems strange, don't you think? I'll try again later but I'm going to be in the U.K for a week so may not be updating my blog for a while.