The Sunday Salon, changes edition

I haven't done a Sunday Salon in quite a while. I find that it's hard for me to find time to post on the weekends, or at least to post anything meaningful. I'd really like to get back into the habit of talking about books more though, so I am making some changes.

First, I've decided to keep a running list of books I want to read and why. My old habit was to just add the book to my Paperbackswap list, or the library list and never think again about why, which meant I couldn't hold anyone accountable if the book sucked was great. (KIDDING.) I'm adding this to the list section at the left and will update it as books cross my path. Links go to the review that sold me on the book. I'll post the list in a separate post in a moment. I'd like to give credit to other bloggers who convince me to try something great.

Another thing I'm slowly working on is to add Books Read in pre-blogging days to the list section. This is a very long process, but I think it'll be nice to see. For some of the years I can only copy the list from Library Thing, so they won't be in the order I read them. (Sadly, I still can't find my orginal book journal. This is one of the things I would have saved in a fire, so it's very sad.)

I joined Goodreads yesterday so that I could add the "currently reading" section to the sidebar. I think I like the Library Thing interface better as it seems to have a lot more information about each book, but Goodreads is free and LT is not, so I went with Goodreads. What is everyone else's experience with Goodreads?

I've been playing games with my library this week as well. I've got 18 books checked out, 3 of which are read and can go back but the rest of them I'd like to keep through our vacation. I've finally figured out that if I renew them all tomorrow it'll give me until the day after we get back. I'm just hoping that there aren't any holds placed on them while I'm waiting it out! Next week I'll post a list of what books I'm thinking of taking on vacation, since we're driving I can take a LOT!

Library Thing? Shelfari? Spiral notebook? Notches on the bedpost?

My Library Thing subscription expired this month (why didn't I buy the lifetime? I can't remember) and I am debating renewing it. While I enjoy it while I use it, I don't know that I use it enough to justify spending money on it right now. I've got so many other irons in the fire that I could easily drop this one, and not notice. I could change my "Now Reading" in the sidebar to something that I manually change- it's not like I ever remembered to change the tags at Library Thing anyway. I also keep a running list of books read up there at the top of this page (on the tab) and in paper journal at home. Cutting something out would be niiiiiice.

But- I spent all that time entering all those books! I do like the features like the groups and the message boards. I like to be able to follow a conversation from the info page about the book. I like to see what other people with similar libraries have. I like looking at everything I've read, all in one place (I use Library Thing to catalog what I have already read, not what is actually in my library.) I hate to have already spent SOME money on it, and not continue using it. I like the Early Reviewers books. Though, I do already have SO MANY books at home that I haven't read that perhaps I wouldn't miss this aspect.

I could switch to a free service, but would I use it more? Tell me, please, what do you do? Do you use an online service? Excel? Just your blog? A paper journal? (This reminds me of another post about a journal that I'll be begging your experiences on later! I better make a note to remind myself. I swear, if I don't make a note I won't remember. My brain is on strike.) I want to be a follower, so tell me, so I can be like YOU-ou-ou. I wanna walk like you, talk like you... sorry, forgot where I was for a second there. Anyway, help me out, tell me what to do.

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Recently Read

In the last three weeks or so I have actually completed two books, and read half of a third! This means the slump is over, right? Here's a couple of quick reviews of two wildly different books.

First, on October 8th my office was closed for Columbus Day. My daycare was open. At that time I was still pretty darn sick, so I opted to take the monkey to play with his friends while mommy "rested". After lunch I crawled into bed with a stack of books, and actually read one. COVER TO COVER!! Shocking. The book I chose to read was The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever by Julia Quinn. Now, if you have browsed my LibraryThing*, you know that I used to be a big romance reader. In the last few years I've moved away from it, but I do still love a good romance. Julia Quinn is my favorite of them all. Her Bridgerton series was great, even if I do occasionally get them confused.

The Secret Diaries was not great. It might not have even been GOOD. I read it, all of it, and had a great time while doing it, but afterwards- eh. It wasn't that it was a romance and I'm out of the habit. It was just a ho-hum storyline. I'm not going to summarize the plot, in the land of romance novels there is a lot of overlap on plot, but this was not done well. It did't seem fresh. The writing wasn't great. There wasn't a great moment or plot twist to make this a great Julia Quinn novel. I later read that this was the first novel she actually wrote, but it was just recently published. I would believe this. It is not up to her standards at all. If you're gonna read JQ, skip this one. I give it a 3/5, because I DID read it in one sitting, but it's not terrific.

The other books I recently finished was A Fistful of Charms by Kim Harrison. This is the fourth book in the Rachel Morgan series. I've mentioned this book a few times in the course of this blog, and it's this book that made me realize something about my reading habits (namely, I don't like it when series characters travel out of their native areas.) It took me something like 8 or 9 months to read this one. It wasn't that I didn't like it. I would be loving what I was reading and put it down not to return for days. Or weeks. I finally finished it up last weekend, and while it is definitely (obviously) not my favorite, it does wind me up to read book five. I loved where it eventually went with Ivy and Rachel (and Kisten). I like the way the Brett storyline concluded. I missed Trent. I hated Nick, but I was supposed to. I also give this one a 3/5, because while it's not bad, it took me months to read it.

In other bookish news, a friend and I recently made a detailed spreadsheet of all the series we were both reading, or potentially both reading. It's got Jim Butcher, Laurell Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Charlaine Harris, and lots more. I think we're up to about 20 series. We tend to trade books back and forth through Paperbackswap and this makes it so much easier. We totally geeked out one afternoon and set it up on google documents and then used google chat to discuss it. In addition to the series names and authors, it tells which book each of us is at, and it would appear that she is AHEAD OF ME on EVERYTHING. Except J.D.Robb. Thank God. I think those 27 (28? 29?) books might bring me close to tied with her for sheer numbers.

*I use LibraryThing to list the books I have already read, not the books I own. The list dates from January 1993, when I was in high school. To see any given year of my life, you'd select the tag for that year (so anything tagged 2007 is something I read in 2007.)