The LibraryThing

I have spent most of today making a library of my books (no, I mean making a library of a small number of my books) on my library at the LibraryThing - a wonderful invention which I discovered when a member kindly wrote a review of SPEAKING of LOVE there.

And as I chose the small number of books I put into my virtual library today (I made myself exclude any that I hadn't really read. There were far too many, but there were also some that I know I'll never read because I bought them so's I'd seem fantastically intelligent - The History of Western Philosophy - or fantastically groovy - SEED - don't ask, but so groovy and weird that its publisher isn't even listed in its pages).

Anyway I began thinking about how much the books that I have read have meant to me, what friends they have been in dark times, how thought-provoking, how comforting, how they've given me places to escape to, how reassuring they've been, how making-me-sit-up-and-take-notice, how funny, how I-wish-I'd-written-that, how I-must-go-and-write-NOW but oddly, never how much blood sweat and tears their writers must have bled, sweated and cried to write them, even though I too now know what it's like to write a whole novel. Which proves the writing-a-novel-is-like-childbirth point ... you forget the pain, until you do it again.

One of the many wonderful things that the LibraryThing does is they make it possible to post random books from my library on my blog ... see These I Have Loved on the right ... don't the covers look inviting? If only there was time to read them all, all over again.