Books!
It’s no secret that I love the books. I love music, movies, art, theater, and kitty cats, too — but books are easy to write about, easy to share, and they are a big part of my professional and personal existence.
Keeping Track of Your Books: Librarything & Goodreads.com
LibraryThing is a great website that lets you enter, organize, classify, and display your books online. I dare anyone to add just 5 books and stop. It’s kinda like Pringles that way. It was the first service of its kind that I used, so the information on all of my books, i.e. type of book, rating, is more thorough. I make a distinction @ Librarything between books I own and books I’ve borrowed from the library. You can search my library below.
More recently I’ve begun using GoodReads.com to keep track of what I’m reading now, what I’ve read before, and what I thought of the books I finished. It’s handy because it has more social aspects to it – updates on what my friends and colleagues are reading, ratings, reviews, etc. My “library” on Goodreads isn’t detailed at all as far as what the books are about, but I’ve reviewed and rated more of them than I did on Librarything.
If you use either LibraryThing or GoodReads, I’ll friend anyone who likes books and writes reviews often!
Authors I Love so Much That If They Wrote a Cookbook, I’d Buy It…
A.S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood, Tom Robbins, Roald Dahl, Jeanette Winterson, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, Graham Greene, Isabelle Allende, O. Henry, Angela Carter, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Ray Bradbury, Aimee Bender, L.M. Montgomery, Clive Barker, Will Self, and Michelle Tea.
Favorite Novels +1 Short Story Collection:
- Daisy Fay and The Miracle Man by Fannie Flag
- Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
- 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Between the Lines by Virginia Woolf
- The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
- The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
- Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
- Tess of the D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
- The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury
Six Short Stories You Can’t Forget
- “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick
- “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman
- “The Tiger’s Bride” by Angela Carter
- “Meneseteung” by Alice Munro
- “Quiet Please” by Aimee Bender
- “The Half-Skinned Steer” by Annie Proulx
Save yourself $80,000 and Read These Instead:
Jen’s Guide to Ten Reference and Nonfiction Books
That Can Substitute for a Liberal Arts Education
- The Great Thoughtscompiled by George Seldes
- An Incomplete Education Judy Jones and William Wilson
- The Synonym Finder J. I. Roadale
- MLA Handbook (Fifth Edition) Joseph Gibaldi
- The Handy Science Answer Book compiled by the Science and Technology Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
- An Underground Education Richard Zacks
- Lies My Teacher Told Me James W. Loewen
- The Cambridge Biographical Dictionary edited by David Crystal
- Writing With Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing John R. Trimble
- The Elements of Style William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
