So, I don’t have anything to tell or show in the knitting department so I was thinking about what I could write about instead. BEcause, you know, if I don’t keep writing, it will be like before and I won’t be writing even if I have something to tell and then I’ll be like “I would love to have a blog… oh wait, don’t I have one?” yeah … so you need to endure my randomness 
Last week I found myself reflecting on my reading habits. Maybe because I had got me the BBC Jane Eyre mini series and the 2006 Persuasion movie from the library, or because I browsed through the blog of a new penpal who writes book reviews. I was asking myself, Do I read enough classics? Do I read enough contemporary literature? Should I read less historical romances, because frankly most of them bore me to death… that sort of thing …
I’ve been keeping a digital book list since I was a teenager. I mean, I’ve been an avid reader since childhood and I’ve been obsessed with lists and keeping track of my reading. As a child I tried to write a reading journal for a while but kinda failed at it. I still have it though, it’s really cute =) I am a bit obsessed with lists… I said it… I like to organise things and I like to analyse things and when I took some excel classes last winter I was amazed. I love excel. Yeah, you can go and shake your head at my weirdness now… but then look at what I did to my excel list last week!
My list is quite exhaustive. Everytime I see something I might like to read, I add it. Everytime someone recommends something to me, I add it. And everytime I add details like, who recommended it, and the date. There were a few old entries, some of which I deleted last week (there where like 20 books from Wolfgang Hohlbein on there whom I adores as a teen but I haven’t read anything by him in years and it’s not really my style anymore). Oh and there are of course all the books that were, back in the day, on the WB’s Rory’s Book Club list. My goal is still to read all that are on there but it’ll still take a while (I read about 25 of them, 87 still to go). Right now I have 301 books on my to-read list. By the way, 54 of them (that’s 18 %) were recommended by my dear Emma … at my current pace of about 20 books a year it will take a little more than 13 years to read all of those books. Well, at least I won’t get bored
On my other page in the excel file I have my “read” list. And this is what I reorganized. I have pretty good tracks of what I read since 2006 with some entries for 2005 and 2004. My strongest year so far was 2007 with 36 books. I know that not very much, compared to what other people read … but compared to what I read in 2011 (15) it’s a lot. Anyway… where was I? Yes, I reorganized that list. I added genres to all the books I read. That wasn’t easy all the time but I tried to keep it broad. So my genres are Contemporary (everything written since the 80s maybe and that isn’t considered a classic, and also not Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Mystery, or Chick Lit), Classics (everything written before roughly the 80s and that is commonly considered a classic), Fantasy (this wasn’t always easy, because obviously some books contain fantasy elements but aren’t really fantasy novels. Also I put all young adult fantasy novels under fantasy because it’s the fantasy element that makes me pick up those books and all fantasy novels that feature vampires under Vampires) which brings me to Horror/Mystery/Vampire. I have single genres for these but the numbers are so small that for counting I put them together. Historical wasn’t an easy category either. In the end I decided that these were the classic German historical novels that are nothing but historical romances most of the time and well, I added the Outlander series to this as well but not for example The Bookthief or The Joy Luck Club, or Atonement which, by common standards, can all be considered historical novels but all have a very different vibe to them than the German historical romances I read which are much more along the lines of the Outlander series. Does it make sense? Then I had a few difficult cases. What was I to do with the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants? I put it into Children’s/Young Adult even though I had put other Young Adult novels into other categories, and then I added Chick Lit to a few books that I felt were more … well… chick lit (The Nanny Diaries, The Timetraveller’s Wife, My Sister’s Keeper). And then I decided to add single categories for both Harry Potter and the Disc World novels. And there’s Non Fiction but really, there are only two non fiction books and I never added the non fiction literature I read for uni, and I don’t read much non fiction for pleasure …
I realized that for what I was doing, just organizing my list and counting what kind of books I read, my system worked. But I also realized the limits. Libraries for example have to organize very differently and other catalogues that are to be searched systematically have to be organized differently again. I had heard my book studies professor, who was an academic librarian by training, complain about cataloguing but realizing it myself as I was writing this list was a very different thing. This only makes me want to become an academic librarian more, though. I want to learn about the ways of categorization and the technical aspects of it. (I only know some very basics things about horizontal and parallel systems).
So … anyway… this was fun and interesting and I love my new book list.
oh and one more thing, I had to laugh so much at this…
oh there’s a typo… anyway… look at the highlighted part… isn’t that funny… two books with the same title, in English and in German, both recommended by penpals, but by different authors and about a year difference end up together on my list … and yes, my list is that weird mix of English and German … my mind is, too you know…
