Tuesday Thingers: Favorite Authors

Today's Question: Favorite Authors. Who do you have named in your LT account as favorite authors? Why did you choose them? How many people share your choices? Can you share a picture of one of them?

I actually have 21 favorite authors. In alphabetical order, they are:

• Peter Abrahams (including me, he has 5 fans - the fewest of all my favorites)
• Jane Austen (has 1103 fans - the most of all my favorites)
• Dan Brown (I know, I know - don't throw anything!! He's got 130 fans, so I'm not the only one, okay!?!)
• Michael Buckley (author of the Sister's Grimm books, in case you're scratching your head on this one - has 7 fans)
• Lauren Child (creator of the wonderful Charlie and Lola books - has 12 fans)
• Eoin Colfer (has 67 fans)
• Michael Crichton (has 153 fans)
• Clive Cussler (has 53 fans)
• Kate Dicamillo (has only 13 fans - I'm actually surprised this one is so low.)
• Fannie Flagg (has 38 fans)
• Cornelia Funke (has 48 fans)
• John Grisham (has 126 fans - he's a sentimental favorite. I haven't read anything of his lately that I was crazy over, but The Pelican Brief will always be one of my favorite novels.)
• Jan Karon (has 34 fans)
• Janette Oke (has 15 fans)
• Rosamunde Pilcher (has 22 fans)
• Terry Pratchett (has 893 fan)
• Philip Pullman (has 746 fans)
• Nora Roberts (has 211 fans)
• J.K. Rowling (has 1,081 fans)
• William Shakespeare (has 532 fans)
• Nicholas Sparks (has 82 fans)

I only favorited an author if I absolutely loved more than one of their books. If I had to narrow it down to just five, I would pick Funke, Rowling, Pilcher, Crichton, and Pratchett. I share 7 favorite authors with one other user, 6 with three other users, and from there it goes up quite a bit.

If I'm forced to pick an absolute favorite author, it would be Cornelia Funke because of one book - Inkheart. Here is a photo of Mrs. Funke.

So, what about you? Who are your favorite authors, and why?

Tuesday Thingers: Popularity

Today's topic is popularity.




What's the most popular book in your library?

The most popular book in my LT library is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. You're shocked, right??

Have you read it?

Yep, about a dozen times.

What did you think?

Oh, I adore Harry. While I think the first is the weakest book in the series (though still a work of genius), it sets the stage, and is a good starting point for younger readers. As I said, I've read it numerous times, and I never get tired of it.

How many users have it?

32,511 (with 438,221 members, I'm surprised it's that low - although, I do have two accounts, with one being for wishlist books only, so if you figure that in, it sort of warps any statistics).

What's the most popular book you don't have?

Well, the most popular book I don't have a copy of is The Catcher in the Rye, but I have read it. The most popular book I've not read and do not own would be Brave New World (with 13,005 owners). Of the top 25 most popular LT books, there are only 2 I don't own and haven't read. One being BNW, and the other is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not sure what that says about me, but there you go.

How does a book's popularity figure into your decisions about what to read?

Aside from the fact that I'm more likely to have heard of a book if it's more popular, it doesn't really. Well, I say that, but really if a book is getting lots of great press, I probably would be more inclined to look it up. I recently bought The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I'm sure I wouldn't have had I not heard such glowing things about it (I haven't read it, yet, so I don't know if it was a good decision or not). I do suppose that popularity affects my reading insofar as good reviews affect my purchases to a certain extent. It's not for the sake of reading what everyone else is reading, but because I figure if so many people like something I'm more likely to like it, too.

Tuesday Thingers: Tagging

Today's questions are about tags.

Do you tag?

Absolutely. I find it is essential in keeping me organized (my library, that is - outside of that I'm a complete and utter mess organizationally speaking).

How do you tag?

I don't have a set-in-stone system. I basically do it on a book by book basis. If I've not read it, I rarely tag it as anything other than TBR (that's To Be Read - in case you were scratching your head in wonder). After I've read a book, I'll tag based on genre, geography, content, whether I own it or it's a loaner, and whatever else strikes me at the moment. I try to be as thourough as possible because I figure it'll help me when I'm searching later on.

How do you feel about tagging- do you think it would be better to have standardized tags, like libraries have standardized subject headings, or do you like the individualized nature of tagging?

I am absolutely opposed to standardized subject headings. Say I want to tag the first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone my husband bought me for Christmas one year. Ok, so perhaps you might find 'first edition' as a standard tag, and it's likely that 'gift' would probably be on the list, but I seriously doubt that 'Stan' is going to be among a list of standard tags or 'Read Aloud to Brandon' or 'Emma's Favorite'. I like being able to personalize my tags, and I'd hate for that option to be taken away. (Ok, so it's silly to be so sentimental about tagging, but I don't think I'd like LibraryThing nearly as much if that aspect was changed).

What are your top 5 tags and what do they say about your collection or your reading habits?

Of my catalogued library of 409 books, my top tags are as follows:

1. TBR - 200
2. Kid Lit - 70
3. 888 - 63
4. 2008 - 40
5. Mystery - 39

What does that say about my reading habits? Well, that I will have to quit my job if I want to make a dent in my TBR pile for sure, that I adore children's liturature, that I'm progressing quite nicely on my 888 challenge, I've read 40 books in 2008 so far (back to the quitting of the job issue), and I have far more mysteries in my collection than I'd have thought.

So how do you feel about tagging??

Library Thing's Most Frequently Unread Books

This is a list of the 106 books most often tagged unread (I actually tag my unreads as TBR, so I guess I wasn't included in the statistics of these) on LibraryThing with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell making the top of the list. Actually, this is the list that's making the rounds of biblio-blogs. If you look at the current list, it's a tad different, but I'm sticking with the original set.

Here are the RULES:

BOLD=books you've read

ITALICS=books you started but couldn't or didn't finish

CROSSED OUT = books you hated (finished or unfinished)

*STARRED*=you've read more than once

UNDERLINED=books on your TBR list (books you own but haven't read, yet)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (technically not a TBR, since I don't own it, but I would like to read it)

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi : a novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey

*Pride and Prejudice*

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities (it was the worst of times)

The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife

The Iliad

Emma (I'm not sure - I think I've read it, but I've seen the movie so many times, I can't be sure. I named my daughter Emma after this character, though.)

The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner (This one's in my Ipod)

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations (I think I read it in school, but I'm not sure)

American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian : a novel

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible : a novel

1984

Angels & Demons

The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (again, I don't own it, but it's on my wishlist)

Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes : a memoir

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake : a novel

Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

The Hobbit

In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers

Free Books for Review

Penguin Classics has a terrific program being offered at the moment through which you can receive a free randomly chosen book from their published 'classics' in exchange for a review that will appear on their Classics Blog. When you register, you agree to read and review your book within 6 weeks of receiving it, and then you'll get an email telling you which book was chosen for you. I've seen on Library Thing people getting books like Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Memoirs of Hardrian. I feel really fortunate - my selection was The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle. Having never read any Sherlock Holmes, I'm extremely excited by this choice.

For more information, or to sign up for the program, go here.

Many thanks to Devourer of Books a.k.a. jlcardwell for the information!

The Last Oracle by James Rollins

The Last Oracle, by James Rollins, is the latest in a series that follows the men and women of Sigma Force, a science-minded group of former Special Forces soldiers. Set against a backdrop of the nuclear devastated area of Chernobyl, it shows just how far some are willing to go to achieve their goals.

As an intellectual thriller, The Last Oracle works. It's smart enough to be enjoyable without being too cerebral. Some of the action sequences were a bit over the top - lots and lots of shooting with very few injuries on the part of the Sigma Force team (think Bruce Willis in Die Hard , who's constantly being shot at, yet never really getting hit). However, the plot was well-planned and executed, with enough suspense to keep you turning the pages, and with an ultimately satisfying conclusion. I found the afterword in which Rollins gives insight into his inspiration to be particularly fascinating.

This was my first experience with James Rollins' Sigma Force, and it can certainly be read as a stand-alone novel. However, I think following the characters from the beginning would add another level of enjoyment to an already fun read.

Bulls Island by Dorothea Benton Frank

I received an ARC of Bulls Island as part of the Early Reviewers program at Library Thing. Because of this, and other perhaps less idiotic reasons, I had high hopes for this one. I wanted to be able to write a glowing review. Unfortunately, it was not to be. There were so many things that bothered me with this novel, not the least of which was an incredibly long prelude. There was so much fretting by the main characters concerning what would happen when the story actually got started that I can only describe it as a 140 page pity party. While I'm on the subject of the main characters, I have to say that I felt absolutely no sympathy for these two completely self-involved narcissists. I know I was supposed to be rooting for them, but they were both so unlikeable. Top all this off with an abrupt writing style and oddly forced dialogue that at times seemed like ill-advised public service announcements, and you've got a book that was a chore to finish. I will say that of the Library Thing reviews, I seem to be fairly alone in my opinion. Most of the other people seemed to really dig it. So, perhaps it's just me.