Looking through my reviews on LibraryThing I found to my alarm that seven of them have been flagged as "not a review". I had no idea that this system was in operation, and no idea until I checked that my reviews had been flagged in this way; in addition, I would defend each of the flagged reviews as being very definitely a review - one of them is actually pretty substantial:

Actually *is* a review!

http://www.librarything.com/work/3093889/reviews/840956
http://www.librarything.com/work/11862/reviews/411717
http://www.librarything.com/work/115367/reviews/114931

Links to a review on my site or my blog!

http://www.librarything.com/work/4041453/reviews/114842
http://www.librarything.com/work/3116747/reviews/425710
http://www.librarything.com/work/3396/reviews/2191976
http://www.librarything.com/work/1386651/reviews/100281

It seems to me that the blue flagging system adds no value whatsoever to LibraryThing; the fact that you aren't told when your review has been flagged and that there is no apparent way of unflagging incorrectly flagged reviews makes it even worse. It should simply be scrapped.

Edited to add: Well, you can now undo a blue flag, which is better than nothing!

Those of you who care have been expressing outrage or satisfaction, depending, about the big news re next year's Doctor Who.

Come on folks, it's not a big deal. It's rather nice that the programme is able to explore both its recent roots (as with this story) and its more distant roots (as with School Reunion and Time Crash). I can't quite believe that some commentators seem to think this means The End Of Doctor Who As We Know It - that happened in 1966 when William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton!

In other news, I am baffled as to why my attempts to list my newly purchased copy of Spectrum IV, edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, breaks my LibraryThing catalogue. I'm sure there is a good reason.

(By the way, I am in Macedonia for the rest of the week.)

Thanks to bopeepsheep:



It's a nifty little image file, new every time you look at the page.

Well, I've spent the morning happily putting all 400 of our children's books onto my LibraryThing catalogue. (Which takes my total book tally to 2869; wonder when I will break 3000?)

I'm sorry to go on about the UnSuggestions, but some of them for classic children's books are too good not to share:

Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr Seuss - Unsuggestion: Olympos, by Dan Simmons (at least until the system realises that I own both).
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, by Dr Seuss - UnSuggestion: Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, by Noam Chomsky
Dr Seuss's ABC and Fox in Socks, by Dr Seuss - UnSuggestion (1) (2): The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka
Mr Brown Can Moo! Can You?, by Dr Seuss - UnSuggestion: No Logo, by Naomi Klein

When We Were Very Young, by A.A. Milne - UnSuggestion: Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan (again, this will change once the system realises I own both)
Now We Are Six, by A.A. Milne - UnSuggestion: Learning Perl, by Randal L. Schwartz

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren - UnSuggestion: The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins
Pippi in the South Seas, by Astrid Lindgren - UnSuggestion: The Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs

Esio Trot, by Roald Dahl - UnSuggestion: A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin (though again, I have both)
The Tale of Two Bad Mice, by Beatrix Potter - UnSuggestion: A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin (as before, I have both)

Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit - UnSuggestion: Being and Nothingness (L'être et le néant), by Jean-Paul Sartre

and this last one is rather poetic, though, alas, it too will probably vanish once the system realises I have both:

Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting - UnSuggestion: Getting Things Done, by David Allen.

Someone challenged me to find an UnSuggestion where I was the only person to own both books. I have a couple of near misses - while I do own copies of Good Omens, the top UnSuggestion for both Gilead and John Adams, and I also own Goodnight Moon, the top UnSuggestion for Native Tongue by Carl Hiassen, I have omitted to put either of the UnSuggestions in question in my catalogue.

But eventually I found a case where I not only own both books but they are both in my LibraryThing, so I am indeed the only user to have catalogued both (and have reviewed both on this journal). The top UnSuggestion for Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century is The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. Not surprised - I found the latter insipid and self-indulgent, and the former dense but rewarding.

Well, that's a satisfying start to the weekend!

Edited to add: Gosh, here's another one that is a bit more surprising - the top UnSuggestion for Russell Shorto's superb history of New Amsterdam, The Island at the Centre of the World, is the equally superb first volume of George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" fantasy series, A Game of Thrones. Do enthusiasts for early American history have and aversion to epic fantasy, and vice versa? I wonder.

For mizkit:
UnSuggestions for Urban shaman by C.E. Murphy:
1. Breakfast of champions; or, Goodbye blue Monday! by Kurt Vonnegut (expected 19.9, found 0)
UnSuggestions for Thunderbird Falls by C.E. Murphy:
1. The old man and the sea by Ernest Hemingway (expected 16.4, found 0)

For autopope:
UnSuggestions for Singularity sky by Charles Stross:
1. The perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (expected 29.4, found 0)
UnSuggestions for Accelerando by Charles Stross:
1. My sister's keeper : a novel by Jodi Picoult (expected 26.1, found 0)

For ianmcdonald:
UnSuggestions for River of gods by Ian McDonald:
1. White Oleander by Janet Fitch (expected 18.7, found 0)
UnSuggestions for Desolation Road by Ian McDonald
1. My sister's keeper : a novel by Jodi Picoult (expected 15, found 0) - again!

For jemck:
UnSuggestions for The Thief's Gamble (Tale of Einarinn) by Juliet E. McKenna:
1. Everything is illuminated : a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer (expected 24.4, found 0)
UnSuggestions for The Swordsman's Oath : The Second Tale of Einarinn (Tale of Einarinn) by Juliet E. McKenna:
1. A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole (expected 18.6, found 0)

I dunno about you, but I was startled by some of those.

Also The Ultimate Hitch-Hiker's Guide seems to come up a lot. I guess because "real" fans have each book separately, whereas those who buy the whole package are probably not genre readers?

Further investigations reveal:

If you own A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, you are unlikely to own Socks Two from Vogue's Knitting on the Go series.

If you own Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny, you are unlikely to own Desiring God: meditations of a Christian hedonist by John Piper.

If you own One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you are unlikely to own Definitely Dead, the sixth in Charlaine Harris' series of Southern Vampire novels.

If you own The Color Purple by Alice Walker, you are unlikely to own F.A. Hayek's classic economic treatise, The Road to Serfdom. Which is ironic, in a way.

If you own the Confessions of St Augustine, you are unlikely to own Sherilynn Kenyon's vampire romance, Night Pleasures.

If you own The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, you are unlikely to own D.A. Carson's highly regarded textbook warning against Exegetical Fallacies.

I could go on all day. It is interesting that theology texts, and paranormal romance, seem to be somewhat isolated bodies of literature.

A History of Doctor Who in Fanvids. (Hat-tip who_daily.) Haven't watched them all yet but enjoyed the Troughton and Tennant ones.

Latest from LibraryThing: The UnSuggester, finding out which books are unlikely to be owned by the same people. Am both amused and slightly saddened to see that those who own Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy are unlikely to own that other great work of political analysis, Terry Pratchett's Thud!.

And the Washington Post on breasts. (Hat-tip bastardsnow.)

Actually the full list of books I own but haven't read is here. The ten most frequently tagged as "unread" by other Librarything users are:

1. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (☑)
2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen (☑)
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (☑)
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison (☑)
5. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli (☑)
6. The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (☑)
7. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (☑)
8. The Confessions of Saint Augustine (☑)
9. Villette, by Charlotte Bronte (☑)
10. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (☑)

Some of these were reasonably high on the to-read pile; others will get promoted when I get back.

A spanking new recommendations system. Log in and click here.

Half a dozen new comment notifications to this post revealed to me that Neil Gaiman had come across my review of his latest book, as a result of browsing himself on Library Thing. It's a small internet. (My very first post on this livejournal was about meeting him at an autograph session in Brussels.)

Three Library Thing users own Purple Homicide, by John Sweeney, an account of Martin Bell's victory over Neil Hamilton in the Tatton constituency dutring the 1997 election. All three of us also have the following Iain (M) Banks books: A Song Of Stone, The State of the Art, Against a Dark Background, The Bridge, Complicity, Use of Weapons, Feersum Endjinn and Look to Windward. Oh yes, and we also all own Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

There are precisely three Library Thing users who have logged copies of Enemies of the System, by Brian Aldiss. All three of us are also the only Library Thing Users to have logged Aldiss' short story collection, Space, Time and Nathaniel and his novel Earthworks, and also - this one really did surprise me - we are the only Library Thing users to have logged Keith Brooke's novel Keepers of the Peace.

(We also, all three of us, own Timescape by Gregory Benford, Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge and Excession by Iain M. Banks, but lots of other people have them as well.)

Hah, wyvernfriend, only another 90 reviews and my total will be ahead of yours!

(Because it's just so important.)

I see that there are five books that have been reviewed by five or more Library Thing users -  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Da Vinci Code, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Eats, shoots & leaves, and The time traveler's wife. But only one Library Thing user has in fact reviewed all five.

(Actually I suspect I may well have put more review links than any other user. Though on close examination I may have duplicated some of them.)

Am within shouting distance of being one of the top 25 users. But I am not going to strive hard over the rest of the weekend to make sure I pass the mark, since I'm pretty confident I will do so eventually. I reckon I'm around half way through, so my total book tally is around 2000 or maybe a little short of that.

Odd things: Sometimes quite difficult to persuade it to find books on, for instance, the Amazon.co.uk catalogue, even when you can find said books yourself on said catalogue (most recent such example: my 1954 Regent Classics edition of Moby-Dick). For some of my other books it's understandable that the search robots couldn't locate them, either on grounds of geographical origin or age.

I'm interested that apart from genre literature the next most popular categopry appears to be theology, with top non-fiction author being John Piper. The only other author of the current top 25 who I simply haven't heard of is Tamora Pierce. I have at least read all the others apart from Mercedes Lackey. Of the top 25 books I've read everything except The Catcher in the Rye, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Life of Pi. But my list of unread books that I already own is quite long enough.

Library Thing blog, syndicated to LJ: library_thing

Library Thing users community: librarything

Oooh, Library Thing. This is going to be one of those relationships. I've put in over 400 of my books already; mostly the Irish and other history shelf beside the computer, and now working my way slowly up the science fiction anthologies, with occasional departures for favourite authors and reviews I've already done on-line. (And I guess that the person whose reading tastes are most similar to mine is in fact the livejournal user of the same name?)

Ooooh, pickwick.... I don't know if I can ever forgive you for introducing me to the delights of Library Thing. I'm just not sure what to do; I input two whole shelves, then I started doing the books I've reviewed on-line, then my Bujold and Zelazny colections. It's going to be a long slow process, and it's all your fault!