Must. Get. Book.

Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street!

Tuesday Thingers: Author! Author!

Today's topic: LibraryThing authors. Who are your LibraryThing authors? What books of theirs do you have? Do you ever comment on an author's LT page? Have you received any comments from an author on your LT account?

I'm a piker here. My only LT authors are Susan Wittig Albert (susanalbert), Monk Ashland (Rettstatt), Shannon Okey (knitgrrldotcom). I have almost all of Albert's books (the ones written under her own name): her China Bayles and her Beatrix Potter mysteries. I might be missing the most recent of the latter, it's on my TBR/TBP/TBmooched list. Ashland only has a single book right now, The Sky Village, but my daughters both found it entrancing and are eagerly awaiting sequels. Okey is a knitting, not a fiction, writer; I have her book Spin to Knit and enjoy it quite a lot. It gave me a lot of support when I was new to the idea of spinning my own yarn for eventual knitting.

I haven't ever gotten or shared comments with any of "my" LT authors, but a few weeks ago I did win an autographed copy of a book from another blog (hi, Fyrefly!), and the author J. Scott Savage did comment here. I still haven't received the book, though (insert frowny face from someone eager for new sci-fi to read...make that devour).

I have to say when I first saw this question my gut reaction was that I was going to have a one sentence answer...but once I started thinking about it, I seem to have had a lot to say. Maybe it's a good thing more of my authors aren't on LT (no, it's not).

Tuesday Thingers: Recommendations

Today's topic: Recommendations. Do you use LT's recommendations feature? Have you found any good books by using it? Do you use the anti-recommendations, or the "special sauce" recommendations? How do you find out about books you want to read?

I do use the recommendations, but I don't bother with a lot of the adjunctive features; I found they were redundant and mostly just suggested books already offered or ones I already owned. The anti-recommendations seemed split between ones I do already own and ones I'd never bother buying ever.

I find I get a lot of recommendations either from my friends list or member suggestions. I stalk my friends' recently added lists and get a lot of ideas from that. I've been known to email them to ask where they found certain unusual items (though the answers are usually something along the lines of "I was on vacation in this tiny village outside of Munich and I found this little shop in someone's back closet where they had a single copy of this volume, and incidentally the retail price was 100 euros" which tends to be disheartening). I mean, if with my weird tastes I think something's actually obscure and unusual, it's probably truly obscure and unusual, not just a mass market paperback I somehow missed in the NYT best seller list. It's a lot of fun doing this and it's an always-changing recommendation list I love. My LT friends have eclectic interests and tastes, and there's always something fascinating and promising among what they're newly cataloguing or reviewing.

I did get some ideas from the built-in LT recommendation lists, but since they're pretty static, it was more of a one time shot. Mostly what I found were volumes I'd already heard of but hadn't thought of for a while, but which I moved to my BookMooch wishlist (which functions as a TBR/to buy one day list for me as well as a Mooch list). It was classics, both among adult and children's literature for the most part, which I enjoyed seeing as recommendations, but there was very little new or surprising. Still, I really appreciate the feature and do check it periodically.

But I never win anything

I've won a signed copy of J. Scott Savage's book, Farworld:  Water Keep.  This is thanks to a blog contest held over at Fyrefly's Book Blog.  Thanks, Fyrefly, I can't wait to read it.

Contest (not here, silly) at Mt. TBR

The Kool Aid Mom, at In the Shadow of Mt TBR, is having a contest--just comment on her blog to enter for a $20 gift card to Borders.
You know, so you can get MORE BOOKS!

It's her first give away and she's a fairly new blogger, so run over there and give her a hello and a boost.

Tuesday Thingers: Popular books

Today's Question: What's the most popular book in your library? Have you read it? What did you think? How many users have it? What's the most popular book you don't have? How does a book's popularity figure into your decisions about what to read?

Well, the most popular books we do own are the Harry Potter series (which we have complete, with multiple copies of almost all of them, and copies in French of at least 4 of them; at one point we had a copy of Half-Blood Prince in Hebrew, but we lent it out and didn't get it back). Harry aside, the next most popular that we have is The Hobbit, of which again we have multiple copies, including an old paperback and a hardback commemorative edition with a protective box, runes all around it, and so on. Going on down the list, we have all the ones that are classics: Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, LOTR of course (only one copy, though, go figure). To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm actually not sure we have Catcher in the Rye; it was never one of my favorites at all.

What we don't have are the modern popular fiction: The Da Vinci Code, The Kite Runner. While the more literary and evocative ones like the latter might be excellent literature, they just don't appeal to me. They're too adult for the kids, and Jeffrey doesn't read books (he just doesn't have time) for the most part, so they're not taking up space on our shelves. I've occasionally read popular fiction (A Suitable Boy and Barbara Kingsolver spring to mind for some reason), but only rarely, and even less often to I find it meaningful to me.

What strikes me most of the list is that there aren't any books on it which we don't own that I want to run out and get. A book's popularity rarely makes a difference to me. In fact I think I take something of a perverse pleasure in not reading what everyone else chooses. Aside from classics, if a book is on a best-seller list, I probably won't be interested in it. Not because I'm trying to make a statement, but just because somehow over the years I've discovered I just won't enjoy most of those works.

Now excuse me, after all this high-mindedness, I have to go hide all my trashy, silly, cozy mystery novels.

Raising them Right

I forgot to post this picture a few days ago when Jeffrey took it from his phone. We were eating dinner, and Gilad finished eating and disappeared quietly back to where his bookshelf is kept. A few minutes later I looked into the kitchen and this is what I found

He was lying on the floor reading a book. I'm so proud. This is my genes at work!

Tuesday Thingers--What's in your LT Account?

The question this week is- how many books do you have cataloged in your LibraryThing account? How do you decide what to include- everything you have, everything you've read- and are there things you leave off?

I have almost 900 books catalogued so far in my LT account. That's out of probably 5000+ books in the house (a number which never stops increasing, mind you). My plan is to be all-inclusive, and I'm going about it geographically, working my way through the house. Because of the way we have the books organized (certain areas of the house contain certain collections), this means that until I'm done the catalog will be skewed depending on which areas I've completed. So far I've done most of our religious works, most of the cookbooks, about 25% of the kids' stuff, almost all of the little kids' books, and about 50% of the needlework books. Then there are other random sections I've done, like most of the Russian literature, certain mystery authors and most of the comics books (heavy on the Bloom County, Garfield, Foxtrot, Calvin and Hobbes, Baby Blues and Doonesbury).

This works because our books are somewhat contained within their areas, but it leaves me with very skewed recommendations!

I'm trying to be sure to enter every book that comes into the house for the first time, but even there I'm failing occasionally. Just this weekend I bought a book for Sachy and realized this morning that I didn't enter it. It's disappeared into the pit which is my boys' bedroom, so who knows when I'll see it again (well, when I catalog the books in their room, obviously). I'm pretty good about getting in what we Mooch, since the BookMooch system allows you to do that directly.

The bigger, unasked question is why? Why do I feel compelled to do this? Why do I care to catalog the household book contents? It doesn't affect anything in the greater world. I am a librarian, though, afterall, and I have certainly established previously that I am flat out obsessed with books: having them, reading them, re-reading them, treasuring them, offering them to my children, and interacting with other people on their basis. Somehow cataloguing my holdings gives me greater control over this as well as giving me an old-fashioned warm fuzzy about my books!

I have to thank LibraryThing for giving me a renewed relationship with my books. I have for once pared down our holdings a bit and sent books out via BookMooch, spurred on by the thought that any books we'll never use can be treasured by others and that any book removed in a timely manner is one I don't have to worry about getting to and cataloguing unnecessarily. I've rediscovered books I hadn't looked at for years, and found ones the children are now appreciating just when they are ready for them.

I think of my LT catalog as an extension of my bibliophilus, and in fact of my book obsession. In a very real way, it is of course and extension of myself and my view of myself and my family

Slow Bee Mystery Shawl in progress

Tomorrow Monika will release clue 3 of the Faroese style Slow Bee Mystery Shawl for the knit-a-long in progress. I am finally caught up after starting almost a week behind after a yarn disaster (my first choice yarn turned out sold tangled in the skein and I just was NOT going to untangle 1533 yard skeins of black laceweight merino/silk). Instead I went with white tencel. It's quite nice, but unfortunately I chose needles a couple of sizes too big. I started with 5s, pulled back to 4s, and really should be working on 2s or 3s.

This is clue 1 finished, draped over the chair because it is already so big I cannot show it well spread out on the needles.

Here is the detail of clue 2 on the side panels. Note the sheen of the tencel (though in fact the photo exagerates this; it does not truly have so much sheen; it is more like linen than like silk).

Here is detail of the center panel. I think this shows how I needed to use smaller needles for better definition of the lace stitch pattern.
I am quite happy with my shawl so far. It is already at over 300 stitches at the end of clue 2 so I suspect it is going to wind up quite large, which will be lovely but may be tedious to work towards the end.

For anyone who wants patterns for similar Faroese shawls or more information, I recommend the books Shawls and Scarves or Stahman's shawls & scarves : lace Faroese-shaped shawls from the neck down

Name that Book: Barbara Michaels? Werewolf

UPDATE: Mabel found it! She remembers it being Barbara Michaels' The Dark on the Other Side! Hooray for the book obsessed with long memories.

I've been searching for a particular book for a while and I think I'm getting close to finding it. I thought the author might have been Mary Stewart, but now it's been suggested that it might be Barbara Michaels, and having checked out her title list, it's sounding possible.

This is a book I read in middle school, in the late 1970s I suppose. We were reading Mary Stewart, H. Beam Piper and Nancy Springer at the time, so it would fit in with that genre and reading level. The only thing I remember is that it involved a couple and a third person, another man, and that the last line of the book was "It was a silver bullet." This referred to the fact that one character had shot another, a suspected werewolf, and wanted to ensure that he successfully ended the terror of the story.

I looked at the synopses of several Michaels titles, and they sound quite familiar, so I think that even though I had totally forgotten she was a favorite author back then, it's likely. Still, I can't pinpoint the exact title. Sons of the Wolf doesn't look quite right, but if it fits the rest of what I have written, it may be the book I'm looking for. If any Thingamabrarians or others reading this can identify the book, I will be quite grateful. Otherwise I may just have to wait until I can go to the public library, find everything they've got on the shelves by Barbara Michaels, and check the last pages of each volume!

What books obsessed you as a child?

I have been talking in LibraryThing with many, many people I could never have met anywhere else, and meanwhile or course thinking more consciously about books. Of course anyone who knows me knows that I always seem to be thinking about books, but at the moment it's quite overt.
In order to divert myself from book aquisition (right now it's spinning and weaving books; what are you buying, hm?), I'm turning my thoughts to what I read as a child. One of the great things about parenthood for me has been introducing my children to books I knew and treasured myself at their ages. Yes, today they have Harry Potter and The Quiltmaker's Journey and many other worthwhile reads which hadn't yet been written during my childhood, but I can't tell you the joy I have felt when they've read (or listened to) and loved Heidi, Charlotte's Web, The Secret Garden, The Velveteen Rabbit, and The Hobbit. It doesn't bother me that none of them get the least bit excited about The Happy Hollisters, Malory Towers or Cherry Ames; I guess those really are once and for all dated.
The one book which I read, and read, and read as a girl, though, was A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I had multiple copies which I kept in my room. I don't know when I discovered it, but once I had devoured it once I returned to it regularly. I never stopped crying when Sara fed Anne; I never got over the cruelty of the rich girls; I never felt much sympathy for Lottie; I always felt for Ermengarde. Oddly, Sara Crewe herself seemed less a human figure to me than some of the secondary characters; she was too perfect, rather like Mary Ingalls always seemed in the Little House books. The rat and the monkey always amused me quite a lot, though.
While The Secret Garden is a beautiful story hidden within a children's tale, A Little Princess is more a pre-adolescent's paradise story; a tale of a child who is important not because of who she is, but what she is inside and what she can do. Her riches at the end have more to do with what she has accomplished as a person than what the diamond mines her father has left her will offer. Every adolescent girl sympathizes with Sara because every adolescent girl (boy too I imagine, but I think it's more prevalent among girls) feels underappreciated, undervalued, and holds a child's self-absorbtion within a persona expected to express an adult's selflessness.
Of course, it would be nice to wake up one morning and find you own diamond mines, wouldn't it?
So what are your favorite childhood book memories, or childhood books? Which ones did you treasure as opposed to the books you now as an adult value?

My books

I've started cataloging my books on LibraryThing as you all may know. I've gotten about 720 in so far, and extrapolating to what's sitting around the house I realize we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 4500-5000 books. If anything, that's a low estimate. And we're not shy about using the library, either.
I go into some people's houses and they have one, maybe two shelves of books; others have bookcases covering every free wall of every room and every staircase. Needless to say, I feel more at home in the latter. My parents have some books, but nothing like our library. We have bookcases everywhere, every child's room has at least one, many of our shelves are double-shelved. There are books piled on my nightstand, books on Kayla's floor, books in 9 month old Adele's room.
I am spending a lot of time on BookMooch now trying to get rid of books we'll never use or never read again (nasty science fiction, lovely craft books of crafts we'll never actually take up, duplicates of mysteries I didn't realize I had already bought, and more). I'm racking up the points sending them out, and I don't want to use the points to bring in more books right now (I should just donate the points right away so I can't use them). There have been times when I have brought 5-6 grocery bags at a time to donate at the library book store and we STILL have all these books (what in the world have I already given away?!)!
I realize I have a very deep relationship with my books. I can't bring myself to give up a good book. I re-read, I treasure, I love them. I can't pass up a good read, and I am somewhat obsessed with providing good books for my children. Books the older children all hate I keep on the chance that in a few years one might change his or her mind, or one of the younger ones may have a different opinion. Books that are classics I stock around the house just in the hopes that one child or another will pick it up at some point (it's worked with Heidi, The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Little Women, Black Beauty, and more). I've started searching out books I read as a teenager to see if they pique the girls' interest the same way (Tirtze does like Nancy Springer, but rejects H. Beam Piper; she hasn't really checked out Mary Stewart yet--I have to find the werewolf one).
My name is Leesy, and I'm a bookaholic. I don't think I'm ready for recovery.

Some knitting and some characters (dingbats in fact)

The long awaited Pikachu slippers are now on Sachy's feet:

He says they don't look too Pikachu-ish; Kayla says they look creepy. Thanks, mom.

Meanwhile, I give you Gilad in his natural habitat (no, not a Studebaker):
He cleaned up half his books, all in an upright pile on half the shelf, then when we told him he would need to start a second pile in the remaining space, he announced, "No, I sit there!" He then proceeded to demonstrate, both his sitting and his reading skills.

And a vision in pink:

the biogeek in me comes out

I just love this. 'nuff said.