literature – Revenge of the Librarian

#603 – Minimalism with an Exception by Angela Melick at Wasted Talent.
Check out the full, four-panel comic by clicking on the image.
Angela Melick rocks! She is the one who created my avatar.

For the past few years, I’ve gone back and forth about what to do with my home library. Neal and I are both addicted to books, so we have rather a lot of books all over our house. A few years ago, I was thinking about cataloging and how to best go about keeping a record of what we have and anything we might want to remember about our library of books. I discovered LibraryThing and was tempted several times over the years, but didn’t take the leap. (We would have to do a membership to catalog all of our books.)

Well, sometimes it’s the little things that make you pull the trigger, and this article jump started my desire to get going on our library again. In the past, I’ve created my own databases for music and books, but I give up part of the way through cataloging, because I have to hand enter everything in. I’ve researched a bunch of scanners in the past, but I kept stopping myself from buying one due to just wanting to save the money. After all, I can hand enter the ISBN for several hundred books, right? How hard could it be?

Okay, so yeah, I read the article and decided enough was enough. I wasn’t going to procrastinate any longer. Well, I wasn’t going to procrastinate on preparing to catalog my books any longer. (I am pretty sure I was procrastinating on finishing up the build on my website for my Plan B, however.) I went to LibraryThing and purchased the CueCat scanner to get started. A few days later, it showed up and I set to work scanning all of the books right in front of me. (For those who don’t know me, that means the books on my end table and on the TV stand, which came to about 50 books. For those that do know me, no, that doesn’t mean I started on the many bookcases in our living room yet.)

So far, so good. Even most of our obscure books have been found, so I think I’ve only hand-keyed two books into the system. (Older books that don’t have ISBN bar codes on them.) I know I will find more as we go along, but it has been fun so far. Child-me was pretty excited to use a scanner again. In fact, I’m pretty sure that using a scanner will never get old: I loved checking out books at the library where I worked in college and I still love using the self-checkout at the library and the grocery store.

This is pretty addictive. I need to keep going on my job and semester work, so I just have to remember that this is a project I can take my time with (even if I want to jump in and catalog my entire library in one day).

Every time Joss Jackson comes out with a new book, she is kind enough to run a Virtual Book Tour for those of us who don’t live near her in Georgia. This means that she goes to a local (to her), indie bookstore and signs a ton of books that all of us wonderful internet people have ordered.

How can you participate in the VBT and get one for yourself? Just go here and check it out.

Wait, what? You want to know why you should get this book? Well, Joshilyn Jackson wrote it, so that’s pretty much the only reason you need.

The main character of The Opposite of Everyone is Paula Vauss, and if you’ve read Someone Else’s Love Story, then you’ll want to hear more from Paula. If you haven’t read SELS, then read my GoodReads review of it right here:

I never felt comfortable while reading this book until the very end. This is fitting; this is right. None of the characters are fully comfortable with each other (or, let’s be honest, even with themselves) either. And that’s perfectly okay, because this book isn’t about fitting in, but about finding the right fit. Shandi Pierce is struggling through figuring out what has even happened in her own life, forget about trying to figure out what’s going on in someone else’s. Her parents are long-divorced but still in a tug of war that has long stretched Shandi out of shape, so much so that the addition of her son Natty just seems like another piece of rope to add to the war. She isn’t even sure whom or what to believe in, let alone what’s going on.

Destiny doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, and in a novel that is about that ever-perched thing with feathers, it certainly doesn’t mean what everyone seems to think it does. Hope is more than destiny, and sometimes it means jumping and finding out where you fall. And sometimes, again, where you fall isn’t remotely close to where you were aiming.

I just wasn’t sure whom to root for in this story. The person you want to root for, you just aren’t sure about, and the person you aren’t sure about, you kind of wonder if you should be rooting for instead. And the big epiphany you just had? We learn that sometimes, just sometimes, that epiphany isn’t the one you should be having, but it’s so overwhelmingly breathtaking that one could ruminate on it for almost too long without realizing the real epiphany is about to hit you in the face.

And then it all hits you and you realize that Joshilyn Jackson has done it again. And you love her and hate her all at the same time, but mostly you just wish the book wouldn’t end.

You don’t have to read SELS before picking up TOoE, but I encourage you to do a Joss-binge and read all of her books before the newest one comes out in February. You may end up shaking your fist at Joss time and again, but you’ll never regret taking the time to read one of her books. SELS has been my favorite so far, but I’m pretty sure that TOoE is either going to be a close second or just replace SELS all together–and I can’t wait to find out!