Library Thing

As you can see from My Library on the left, I like fantasy! Our imaginations are wonderful things, and we can create marvelous places with them.

The Mercedes Lackey books are set the The Five Hundred Kingdoms, and have fairy godmothers, dragons, wicked sorcerers, and some really spunky princesses. Terry Pratchett has a whole series of hilarious books set on the planet Discworld. Going postal and Making money feature former con artist Moist von Lipwick (pronounced Lipvig). Poor Moist, the tyrant of Ankh-Morpork has caught him and is using his skills to revive the post office and the royal bank. Both series are funny and charming.

Looking backward and Walden two are more serious works that lay out new ways of living that their authors thought would create utopian communities. Edward Bellamy was a social reformer who believed that nationalizing industry would eliminate poverty. His book was written in the late 1800s, and it's kind of depressing to realize that the problems he was railing against are still here-- the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. B.F. Skinner was a psychologist who was developing a science that would train people to be good members of society.

Library Thing's Very Short Introduction was very easy to follow, and I was able to set up my account and catalog seven books in very little time. I had to have Dweller Underground's help to get the widget into my blog, though.

I like Library Thing's reviews much better than Amazon's-- Library Thing's members seem to be literate, and you can't always say that about Amazon's contributors. The recommendations are also good-- I've already started a list of additional books to read.

Here is the link to my library (I hope): http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Cataloger60

Flickr

I think sea shells are some of the most beautiful things on the planet, and I enjoyed looking at them on Flickr.

I started my Flickr assignment by reading most of the suggested "additional background information" sources. The Wikipedia article on Flickr is everything an encyclopedia article should be-- it covers the history of the site, its features, how it's used, etc. The BBC article on Flickr talks about how it can be used in social networking, and the Wired article has short descriptions about Flickr and a couple of its competitors. All of these are worth reading.

I'm not planning to get an account with Flickr, but I went through the tour and it looked very easy to use.

Anemones are beautiful and come in all sizes and colors. I have an orange one that's bigger than my fist, and a little green one like the one below.

I learned a little about Flickr this week, and a little about putting pictures into my blog!

My first picture!

I love fog.

Words of wisdom

"It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human, and disorder is our worst enemy." Hesiod

Funny mysteries

I like my mysteries to have a lot of humor, with a focus on interpersonal relationships, and not much gore.

The Meg Langslow books by Donna Andrews are some of the funniest mysteries I've ever read. In the first book, Murder with peacocks, Meg goes home to Yorktown to organize three weddings-- her best friend's, her brother's, and her mother's. The Kirkus review said it "will leave you helpless with heartless laughter", and it does. Meg's parents, brother and sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., have their little quirks, but they're very endearing, and they play important roles in all the books in the series. Some of my other favorites in the series are Revenge of the wrought iron flamingos (Meg at a Civil War reenactment), Crouching buzzard, leaping loon (Meg investigates problems at her brother's computer games company), and We'll always have parrots (Meg attends a fan convention for her fiance's TV series).

Anne George's Southern Sisters mysteries star Patricia Ann (60 years old, 5' 2" tall, 110 pounds) and her sister, Mary Alice (she started counting her birthdays backwards when she turned 65, says she's 5' 12" tall, and admits to weighing 250 pounds). Patricia Ann says that if they hadn't been born at home she'd swear that one of them had been switched at the hospital. If you have a sister, you'll agree with me that she has their interactions down perfectly. I can read these over and over, and laugh every time. The series begins with Murder on a girls night out and finishes with Murder boogies with Elvis.

Jane Haddam wrote five funny mysteries under the name Orania Papazoglou. They take place within the romance-writer community in New York City, and you have to love them just for their titles: Sweet, savage death; Wicked, loving murder; Death's savage passion; Rich, radiant slaughter; and Once and always murder.

Week 4 - RSS

I did the activities for Week 4 all by myself! This is the first week that I haven't had to ask Dweller Underground to come over to my computer to tell me what to do next. (I did get a lot of help from her blog, though.) I'm using Google Reader so more of my krl2pt0 stuff will be in the same place, and I didn't have any trouble with Microsoft trying to steal my stuff.

I've subscribed to two KRL blogs so far-- Dwelling on Technology from Underground, and Humor Memoranda. They're both amusing, with different slants on the whole process. :-) I'm sure I'll be subscribing to more, once I work my way through the list. I've also subscribed to krl2pt0.

I subscribed to the Cataloging News blog from Hennepin County Library. They used to have a radical cataloger, Sanford Berman, who did battle with Library of Congress over subject headings. He thought we should be using common language for subject headings, rather than LC's weirdly-formulated constructs. As an example, the LC subject heading for house plans is not "House plans" but "Architecture, Domestic--Designs and plans". Not exactly intuitive, is it!

Tomorrow I'll search for an interesting podcast so I can do the extras for the week.