Seasonal Plume

I finally caved and got a two-year membership at Kinokuniya. I should have done this earlier, but I kept putting it off because I kept telling myself that books are cheaper in the Philippines. Which is true, but then the selection generally isn’t as good. I finally went and got the card, telling myself that I’ll be able to make up the membership fee since I’ll be getting:

1. All of Kamio Yoko’s Hana Yori Dango,
2. All of Takaya Natsuki’s Fruits Basket, and
3. Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series

…among others. Just getting all of Hanadan within two years actually makes up for the membership fee already! I bought a couple of things today and already got a discount of a bit over six dollars.

I remember when we were children, our parents got us memberships at one Armchair Reader, which is an interesting library concept: it was a pretty comfortable, borderline posh place (well, pretty usual nowadays with Starbucks dotting the cities, but as ignorant kids the huge cushy armchairs were posh) with shelves upon shelves of books of pretty much whatever genre. A membership apparently granted you free stay at the “library” for however long, where you can read whatever books that you liked, and then discounts for borrowing books. Our parents would leave us there while they do “grownup stuff” (like look for paints, lights, household fixtures, etc). I still have fond memories of the place and feel sad they shut down a long time ago.

I’d have to say, though, that aside from these two and the usual school library memberships, I haven’t been part of anything else that’s reading-related. That’s kind of sad, although as a kid I don’t seem to have suffered adversely from the lack of it.

I created an account on Shelfari a while back, but never really got into using it. Just today I decided to revisit it, to see a lot of really nifty improvements, both in the look and feel and with the feature set. I love that you can segregate books according to once you plan to read, are reading, and have already read — plus you can specify if it’s a favorite, if it’s a wishlist item, and/or if you own it.

The last few meta information that the collect is fabulous. I’ll admit I haven’t frequented a lot of book library sites (because it’s always frustrated me at some point) but this last bit was something I was looking for in these types of sites for a long time. I don’t necessarily have all the books I’ve read, after all. A lot of my books are kind of co-owned with my sister. Having these options made me go into a book-adding frenzy.

Until I got frustrated because the editions I wanted weren’t exactly there, did not have the right title, and/or did not have the right cover. For example, I have The Gunslinger put up as The Dark Tower, even though it’s obviously not — it’s only part one of The Dark Tower series, people!

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m nitpicky enough to need them to list it correctly, and to get annoyed that I can’t get the right entries. I had the same problem with the books from The Chronicles of Narnia, which is a travesty! I now don’t have Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Prince Caspian in my shelf precisely because of this. Not to mention, the books in my shelf aren’t all from one edition! It’s annoying, really annoying.

What online book library sites do you use? Is there something better than this, that maybe I just haven’t explored enough? Or should I just roll my own?

I’d been meaning to put into words my thoughts on one article I saw on Digg a week or so back — on facts about the Online Computer Library Center top 1000. According to it,

[They] compiled a list of the top 1,000 titles owned by member libraries—the intellectual works judged to be the most worthy based on the “purchase vote” of libraries around the globe.

It’s an interesting list of interesting (and sometimes bizarre!) facts about books that are found in most libraries. It’s US-centric, but hey it’s still interesting. I suggest you read the article to get all the trivia, but the ones that were most interesting to me were:

1. William Shakespeare had the most work in the top 1,000 with 37 works which isn’t surprising; John Grisham was third with 13 works; and Stephen King didn’t place at all. The Stephen King work to get nearest to the top thousand is The Gunslinger. (Which is the first King book I’ve read…and I’ve never read any other save the DT series.)
2. Highest-ranking written work by women were Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë), Jane Eyre (C. Brontë), and Pride and Prejudice (J. Austen). They are separated from each other by exactly one gap each (at 28, 30, and 32, respectively). I didn’t like the first, but the other two are my top two books of all time.
3. Jesus is the most written-about person in the World Category (I assume that’s what they mean by “WorldCat”; correct me if I’m wrong).
4. Comics in the library! Garfield is 15th.

It makes me wonder, really, how Philippine libraries would fare. I’ve never been to a library (that I could call a library) in a long time.