SassyBlonde

So I think by now we're all aware that I can be a little OCD about organization. The cleaning thing was the first admission, this just follows for a Type-A person, right? (That was for The Muse and for Heidelah, with whom I was debating where we fall on the whole A-B continuum the other night. The first step in recovery is admission I guess.) Anyway, for a while one of the things on my OCD little list has been to catalog all of the books we've got in this house and sort them out in terms of keepers and traders.

Keepers are defined as books we're particularly attached to, have special memories of, or are likely to read again at some point in the near future. There are particular one-offs there, but mostly there are a lot of series authors in this category: Tolkien, Jordan, Goodkind, Carey, Willams, Rowling, Rice, Montgomery, etc. Stacks and stacks of pristine hardbacks, and a list of to-be-acquireds to replace the paperbacks that have become ragged and overly loved.

This kind of brings us to the traders column: books that we're done with or have too many of in some form, which are promptly posted on PaperBackSwap and hopefully soon winging their way across the planet to people who have some use for them and earning us book credits so we can get the books we're looking for too.

But back to the keepers for a minute-- I have to have a way of keeping them all straight, so to do that I use LibraryThing. (Many thanks to domesticat for that heads-up a long time ago. Smooches-- love ya' for that, and a lot of everything else too, but that's beside the point.) LibraryThing rocks my socks, because Zip, Boom, Bonjour! you whip out your :CueCat and you have a neatly assembled and searchable list of your entire library, complete with duplications and swapping capabilities on the most popular book swap sites.

There are all kinds of other cool bells and whistles, book suggesters, lists of people who have overlapping collections like yours, and probably my favorite one, The Unsuggester.

Basically what The Unsuggester does is figure out what books you are least likely to have in your collection based on those that you've entered, and man does it come up with some seriously awesome and spot-on assumptions. For instance, after my long bout of entries today, The Unsuggester has decided that my sci-fi collection and Christian biblical analyses and sociological literature are uniquely unsuited for one another, which I find strangely validating and pretty much exactly correct-- the only Christian lit I have was basically given to me at some point, outside of a couple of C.S. Lewis analyses that I find interesting on a purely theoretical basis.

To further back up its track record, it also lists Sophie Kinsella and some Jodi Picoult, to which I say, bang-up job, you lovely piece of software because neither of those are even close to on my radar. Apparently I have no love for queens and presidents either, but at this point there's not much room in my heart as I'm spending my days drooling over Aaron Peirsol (rrrrowwrrr) and the American swimming boys.

I wonder what it would "unsuggest" for you guys?