Librarything: Crowd-sourcing for readers.

August 26, 2008 Finding books, Review 2 Comments

I live in fear of a Mount TBR (to be read) avalanche, but I still can’t get enough book recommendations. One of my favourite tools for book recommendations is LibraryThing.

LibraryThing begins as a book cataloguing service - up to 200 books for free, and and your whole library for a small lifetime membership fee. You can do all the standard things - tag and search your books, add notes and reviews and select cover art for display. Fancy graphics let you visualize your library as a montage of covers. Maybe some readers would find that enough.

But the real value comes in leveraging crowd-sourced information through the libraries of others. You can select a user-uploaded cover, if Amazon doesn’t supply one to match yours. And you can see others with similar libraries, and get recommendations of what books you might like, based on the books you already have. This is a cool feature. I used to only enter books as I read them, and not my big pile of TBR’s. The recommendation feature would routinely serve me up a list of the unread books I had sitting on my bookshelf. So cool.

Other cool features include the inclusion of real libraries, and libraries of famous dead people, or current authors. They have a unique Early Reviewers program, that allocates books to those with the most appropriate library. And if you don’t like amazon reviews, this is an excellent source for book reviews.

The science of fiction

August 14, 2008 Why reading?, links 1 Comment

Novel Ideas picked out an interesting article inNew Scientist magazine (28th June). The issue reports on the mental benefits of reading fiction. Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology, has conducted research which shows that people who read more fiction may find it easier to discern the thoughts and feelings expressed by people’s eyes. He likens fiction to a simulation that runs on the software of our minds, and may help us when negotiating the complexities of social life.”

(Via Novel ideas : Manly Library.)

Oatley’s has also published investigation into emotions of literary response and some interesting work on deduction and inference in literature.

Introducing Scalpel’s Edge

August 14, 2008 links No Comments

I would like to introduce you to a new blog, Scalpel’s Edge. Since becoming more active on Twitter, I have been itching to have a place to share my PhD and surgery experiences. I prefer to have more blogs and keep them on topic, rather than one big melting-pot blog. For example, I am trying to restrict posts here to literature and books.

I invite you to go an check out some of my posts at Scalpel’s Edge, like the story of why I chose to become a surgeon.

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