Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Tuesday Thingers


Do you have any unique books in your library- books only you have on LT? How many? Did you find cataloging information on your unique books, or did you hand-enter them? Do they fall into a particular category or categories, or are they a mix of different things? Have you ever looked at the "You and none other" feature on your statistics page, which shows books owned by only you and one other user?

Interesting...very interesting. According to the "You and None Other" feature, I own 2 books that I share with only one other LTer. Those are The Greatest Mysteries of All Time, a collection of short stories, and I Know What the Night Knows by Ed Gorman, also a mystery. Both are audiobooks.

I have a fairly large number of books that I share with fewer than 10 other readers and they fall into 2 clear categories: erotic novels and cookbooks. From the looks of things, there are 5 other people who get the yearly Better Homes and Gardens cookbook every Christmas; our moms probably shop in the same places. I would hazard a guess that there are a lot more people who own books in both categories but simply don't have them in the system.

From the looks of my library, I have two books that have no social data at all. One is an erotic novel; no surprise there. The other is a biography called Returning Frankie's Rocks: How a Son's Journey into the Heart of Compulsive Collecting Led Him Back to His Mother by Dana Horing. That seems really surprising to me, and I'm going to have to do a little investigating to see if I have selected some odd edition of the book, which leaves me all alone with this one.

This has been a great question and it has led me to my next big project on LibraryThing! Looking through my library, I own a lot of books that I have read, but for which there isn't a single review. I think it's time to start putting some notes up there on these books.

7 comments:

Marie Cloutier said...

I catalog my cookbooks too & I've noticed lots of them have few other users. I'm shy about the other stuff! :-)

Anonymous said...

That's a great idea to post reviews for the books that have none. One of these days I'm going to write a review for every book I've read before LT. I've always written one since joining

Leesy said...

See, I really should go in and write reviews on the cookbooks. I wouldn't bother for the religious works I have uniquely, since others who would be inclined to buy them already know the score on those, but I can see how it would be valuable to know how good a cookbook is.

Lisa said...

Marie, the only time I worry about it is when I look over at the "random titles from my library" and it has...well, something that makes me hope Mom has gotten a different random assortment. But she knows me well enough to not be terribly surprised.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a good goal to have!

Literary Feline said...

For awhile there I was going back and adding reviews of books I had written journal entries for before I began blogging or participating in LT, but I stopped somewhere along the way. Probably got too busy. I will have to make a note to myself to go back and do that whenever I get the chance. Thanks for the reminder!

Unknown said...

I thought I'd probably have one or two books I own that nobody else has, but so far I don't have any completely unique books. The one book that I share with only one other user isn't remotely exotic -- The Canadian Reporter: News Writing and Reporting. Real special. :-)