Still More Books

For those who might care* I thought I would mention that I've just updated my online "book of books", the database in which I keep a list of the books I've read.† I only seem to get to updating it once a year or so; therefore you'll find that I've added titles from about the past 12 months. Even if you look right away, though, it won't be complete–I just finished another mystery last night.

I was telling Bill (friend of this blog) the other day that I've had a dry spell recently in which the series of books by mystery authors I had been reading ran out and I didn't have leads on new authors to follow-up. What a dilemma! I hate when that happens. My one known resource for some suggestions is the Christchurch [NZ] City Libraries "If You Like…" page of suggestions. It's not perfect but it can help.

Bill and I therefore frequently exchange the names of authors we've enjoyed. So, for you mystery readers, how do you find new authors?

Here's the book of books, before I forget.

Oh, for my benefit and yours, there's a new search function that can find a fragment of text in any of the text fields. If you want to search for "foo" embedded someplace in the midst of such text, surround it with percent signs, the SQL wildcard for "any number of characters" thus: "%foo%". So much easier than trying to remember an author's last name and type it entirely correctly.
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* I can't imagine why anyone would, but I don't mind sharing. One reason I keep the database is so that I can find out whether I've read a book before; I keep it online so that I can look at it when I'm at the library.

† I am tempted to say all books except that the list now includes a few thousand titles and it's unlikely that I've remember to write down everything accurately, let alone remembered to write down everything. Besides, there is ambiguity about what, exactly, constitutes a book, and there are times I've included things I didn't include at other times. (What to do with serialized things in The New Yorker, say, or volumes that have "Three Novels by _____"?

Posted on July 23, 2009 at 22.26 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Books, Personal Notebook

One Response

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  1. Written by Melanie
    on Wednesday, 29 July 2009 at 08.41
    Permalink

    I love this — I have a list of books I've read since 1995, but only on paper. It would be nice to have it searchable. You have a great list to peruse here, how fun will that be…

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