Oddities
I find it interesting Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Anansi Boys, Neverwhere) and Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, The Confusion) are so well represented on the list, relatively speaking.
It's quite the eclectic mix; curiosity demands that I look at how they generated this list.
It's quite the eclectic mix; curiosity demands that I look at how they generated this list.
Posted by sealionii on
Monday October 8, 2007 at 4:03pm
LibraryThing is a web site where you can upload books you've read or own, both for an easily accessible catalog (e.g. from your cell phone while book-shopping) as well for recommendations based on other people's libraries (e.g. people's bookshelves who match up 90% with yours ... what's in that other 10%?).
You can also tag books with labels that describe it, e.g. cryptography, cyberpunk, and science fiction are popular tags for Cryptonomicon. Then you can click on a label and see what books other people have given that same label to.
So people started using these labels to tag books that they wanted to read, making a virtual "list" of books to get the next time they were at the library or whatnot. The list I linked to is the top books with the tag "to read" or similar, with the parentheses denoting how many people have tagged that book as something they want to read.
http://www.librarything.com/tag_allbooks.php?tag=to_read