Themes

Mysteries, December 2008–January 2009

Maritime Literature, January–March 2009

Short story Fridays

Chronology

About

About me

Contact me at nicole at bibliographing.com.

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Booking Through Thursday—Endings

What are your favourite final sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its last sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the last line?
Final sentences are much, much harder for me to remember. As soon as I read last week’s question [...]

The Myth of Writing

One thing about me is that while I’ve spent nearly my whole life constantly reading fiction, I’ve never wanted to write it. I don’t think I have an ounce of storytelling blood in my body; my creativity is limited to knitting socks and cross-stitching replicas of Mondrians (no, that is not a joke). Do all [...]

TuesdayThingers

Today’s question: Cataloging sources. What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT’s almost 700 sources?
Most of my books have been added from the Library of Congress; Amazon comes in second. I [...]

Where Three Roads Meet by Salley Vickers

Where Three Roads Meet by Salley Vickers is the latest in the Canongate-sponsored Myths series (Canongate seems to have inexplicably given up the domain of the series homepage; LT series page here; n.b. The Fire Gospel is not actually out yet [in the States?]), which I have been following devotedly ever since first picking up [...]

Sunday Salon

This is my first Sunday Salon post, to say that I haven’t done any reading today!
My weekends usually follow a routine. From Friday afternoon to Sunday morning, I spend time with my consumption partner (to borrow a euphemism from the lovely Kerry Howley), because I don’t have much time to do that during the work/school [...]

Uninformed Reviewing and a Saturday Poem

On the subject of informed reviewing, I decided to participate a while back in the Blog a Penguin Classic effort, and my randomly chosen book was the complete poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Now, I don’t want to complain too much, as this is certainly easier than some of the other random assignments (can’t remember [...]

On Informed Reviewing

Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation has posted recently about his planned “Summer of Roth,” and on Wednesday explained himself further.
It started back when Wyatt Mason, writing at his superb new blog Sentences, mused about how much of his backlist reviewers coming to Roth’s new novel Indignation should know. As he told it, “With Roth, [...]

Booking Through Thursday

What are your favourite first sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its first sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the first line?
I’m afraid I am a little boring when it comes to this question. “Call me Ishmael,” and “It [...]

Envy me!

This afternoon’s reading spot:

My version of beach reading: listen to the surf and read about the real sea, ignoring the depressing lack of salt air off Lake Michigan. But still, it’s pretty damn nice.

In Defense of the UnSuggester

Back in June, thekoolaidmom discovered LibraryThing’s UnSuggester and posted about its rampant anti-recommendation of many Christian books.
In defense of the UnSuggester, I think it first helps to understand how it works, which can be a little bit confusing. It’s all based on co-ownership probabilities, similar to the suggester, but somehow the converse has more of [...]