Books, Books, Books

This past weekend, Stephanie and I went to my company’s warehouse employee book sale. This is where they lay out all the returned stock from bookstores and let us purchase it at a steep discount, which means that it doesn’t need to get recycled or trashed. It’s one of the great perks of my job for book lovers like us, and is a really great deal, money-wise. I was able to pick up many books that have been on my “to read” pile for a long time.

On the other hand… we came home with 160 books. 57 of them were mine, 30 of them are presents for family members, and 73 of them are Stephanie’s. So… yeah. We made great strides in reducing clutter this year in our house, then frakked it all up. Heh. Actually, the sheer volume of stuff we cleared out this year is quite a bit more than the books we acquired, so we’re not at all back where we started. But we have a lot of book storage to come up with.

And I have a LOT of books. Doing the math – I acquired more books at this sale than I read this year, easily, and I did the same thing last year. And I also bought quite a few new books this year, although one of my goals was not to do that. I feel guilty that there are so many wonderful books in my library that I simply haven’t read. And many of them have been sitting there for quite some time, while I go around willy-nilly, checking out new titles from the library and buying new books from the bookstore.

So… that leads me to my 2008 new year’s resolution(s), which I’m making a bit early:

In 2008, I will read only books that I already own, and read more of them than I have in the last few years. To accomplish that, my plans are:

  1. I will not buy ANY books in 2008, new or used, unless I have to for work, with one exception – next year’s year-end warehouse book sale, and that only if I accomplish my resolution, and I can only purchase as many books as I’ve read in 2008.
  2. If I need a book for book club, I’ll check it out from the library, or (worst case scenario) Stephanie will buy it.
  3. I will NOT check books out from the library this year, unless it’s for book club. (I know that seems strange, but the goal is not about saving money, it’s about focusing my attention on my own library.)
  4. Do a massive purge of my feed reader and severely reduce the number of blogs I read regularly.
  5. Carry my current read around with me everywhere, so that I focus on it, and not the magazines in the doctor’s waiting room, the internet while I’m waiting for gym class, etc.).

So there it is – my official 2008 New Year’s Resolution. Let’s see if I can stick to it.

2019 update: I did not succeed at this resolution. Not this year, or any other year that I made it.

2022-03-12 Update: And I haven’t since 2019, either.
Continue ReadingBooks, Books, Books

we’ve been going non-stop

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And I haven’t had a free moment to blog. Or perhaps I have, but I spent it trying to unwind instead. We’ve been to parties galore, but I haven’t got the pictures off my camera yet.

On Saturday morning we went to my company’s warehouse book sale and walked away with 91 books for about 40 bucks. Yeah, like I needed that. But I have a plan for streamlining my books in the coming months, and reading and then disposing off lots of books to free up space on my shelves.

Saturday night we went to Jennifer’s annual Christmas party, complete with pink flocked tree. And Sunday we went to Christmas at my Dad’s. I got new truck tires for Christmas! Yay!

Stephanie went to a Christmas party for our neighborhood association’s board last night, because she’s the treasurer now. Dunno if I blogged that or not. I stayed home because I was too tired to go, and read a bit instead.

Oh, and we canceled our HBO from cable (I haven’t watched anything on it in months anyway) and we signed up for Netflix instead. I watched the first disc of season 3 of Seinfeld and sent it back already. I’m really enjoying picking out movies – I added pretty much everything on my Movies I Need to Watch list.

span class=”hilightyellow”>2019 update: Yeah, we have never managed to streamline books for any length of time, or to free up space on shelves. We regularly purge, but books seem to magically appear.

Continue Readingwe’ve been going non-stop

Social Networking for Bookworms

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The Wall Street Journal writes about a new social networking site called LibraryThing.com — for people to create catalogs of their books. Similar to software like Booxter or Delicious Library, you record all of your books in a cataloging data set. But in this case the database is stored online, and is shared with other users.
The software is free for up to 200 books (haaa!) and $10 for a year or $25 for life. I haven’t investigated to see how data can be exported from the program after being entered, but I would think that would be a must-have feature.
I’m currently using Booxter to catalog my books. Sort of. Everything’s in a uproar now. But I chose it because it’s cheap and it exports the data to a tab-delimited file that I can use to create a database. After using it awhile, I sort of changed my mind and wished I’d shelled out a bit more for the Delicious Library software, because it also catalogs DVDs and video games, which I now have libraries of as well. If you’re looking for slot machine games online, then try out joker123.
But LibraryThing.com is interesting for the social networking component — you can tag your books like Flickr… and you can see what other people have bookmarked, too. I’m going to poke around in it a bit further.

Continue ReadingSocial Networking for Bookworms