Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Perhaps our library is overlooked not only because its a mess, but its not listed as a topic and indeed i can't access on my GR phone app.
Not entirely sure this will be useful but its a start where we can discuss plans

Petra, with all that time on her hands now :-) is considering becoming our librarian. Yay Petra!

Here is a perfect place to add what you might want from such a library. So far there are the go to shelves for when you are in the mood for something vaguely specific, like a book on whatever, or a funny book or a book written in another language. Then theres authors. One of the ideas was to list our recs for an authors best introduction.

Petra, do you have specific questions?
Ideas?

Thanks, Magdelanye, for this opportunity. I've had a look at the shelves and think they could help us to capture those great books we discuss in the threads. It would be nice to have a place to go find them in future when we have the time to read them.

I have some clean-up questions for you all:
1. some books are not on a shelf and are listed only as "read". If the "added by" person is still in this group and cannot remember specific details to move the book to a shelf OR if the "added by" person is no longer in this group, should these books be deleted from the bookshelf?
Reasoning: if our shelves are to help us find a book for a specific topic, these books will never show as they are not on a shelf. Therefore, they will never be referenced.

2. Some of the shelves may not be as helpful as they could be. For example, "Authors"......all books have authors, so this isn't as descriptive as it could be for helping someone find a book. Looking at the contents, there are 3 authors listed.
a) do we want to list every book a specific author wrote? Do we really find all books by one author "great", "memorable" or something and want it added to our bookshelf?
There are better ways, I think, of categorizing an author's works by subject matter, such as "dying", "laughable", etc. This would help us find what we're looking for better than "authors" since most author's books focus on a specific subject matter.
And some author's works are duds and perhaps won't be listed on our shelf.

b) do we want to list books we don't recommend? I see shelves for "good enough", "meh", "blech" and "yuk". Not shelves I would look to for a book recommendation. :D

3. how do we decide which books to add to the bookshelf? If we add every book mentioned, our bookshelf would become humungous and not very helpful. We read a lot of books and we don't always recommend them. (see "b" above).

If we want our bookshelf to list the books we love or very much enjoyed, I would recommend that the person lists the book here and it's sorted and shelved here by the group.
For example, Perdido Street Station (already on our shelf) is recommended here in this thread as an addition to the bookshelf, we decide as a group that it is a "steampunk" novel and whether or not it gets a rating ("very good", "wonderful", "brilliant" are choices at the moment). Once we settle all this, I add the book to the bookshelf as we have decided.

Which leads to another question:
Do we need a rating system on our bookshelves? Not all our current books are rated, so it's not a useful tool at the moment.
I don't think we need rating shelves.
We should know that the book is already "very good", "wonderful" or "brilliant" by the mere fact that it's on our shelf and not have any rating shelves at all.
I don't think we'd recommend a book for the bookshelf that we didn't find special in some way. Therefore, I don't find the ratings shelves necessary. They merely add clutter.

Those are the questions that I had when looking at our bookshelves for the first time.

My idea would be:
1. cleanup the shelves.
a) do we remove some books currently on the shelf? (ie those that are not shelved and merely "read")
b) do we remove some of the clutter shelves? (ratings, "authors", "French authors", etc)
c) do we rename some of the other shelves? (are their titles currently helpful if we are looking for a topic?)

2. decide on a process for adding books to the shelves
a) the only method I've got right now is suggest it in this thread and, as a group, we decide on a shelf, then I add it as suggested.
I don't think it's very helpful if I shelf it incorrectly in some way and if I haven't read the book it would be difficult for me (or any future librarian) to shelf it.

3. the bookshelf is for everyone. Therefore, everyone's suggestions are needed to make this something we can all use. Please add any thoughts and suggestions here.
My suggestion is to keep it simple and easy. If it's too complicated, it's a clutter-mess in the end. :D

Whew! What a lot of (good) thought you've put into this.

Would it be possible for people to write when they recommend a book? Or is that too much work for the librarian to hunt out?

I would like to know if a book is "highly" or just "recommended". Other ratings don't interest me. Maybe just the fact that it's on the shelves means it's recommended.

Maybe we could go through the shelves and find books we've read and decide if we want to recommend them or not? Would there be some way of doing this or should we just delete them? Could anyone add to the shelves or just the librarian (it seems simpler if it's just the librarian but maybe too much work?).

I will definitely keep thinking about all this.

Ellie, other than the 3 read at your peril selves, meh bleh and ech, all the books are highly recommended. Meh is for popular books that fail to live up to their hype. I\m sure we could all find some books like that that were sheer disappointment. Thing is, what would make it even more pertinent would be to allow for challenge opinions.
Blech is for a distasteful book and ech truly cringeworthy.

Is there a way we can consider each book...theres not that many, and figure out a way sort of like a poll to decide if it belongs on shelf without going crazy? Like, I know that the Waves is VWs most marvellous book but would everyone agree with me.? And wouldnt the arguments be interesting.

Petra wrote: "Thanks, Magdelanye, for this opportunity. I've had a look at the shelves and think they could help us to capture those great books we discuss in the threads. It would be nice to have a place to go ..."

Petra I tried to answer your questions in my answer to your pm/
So far we agree that clutter needs to go, Will we agree on what we consider clutter :-) But it should definitely be easy to navigate.
Have you figured out how to add a shelf? I'm sure that in the addition to the ones I've already mentioned, others will have some good ones.

My take is that if a book is truly cringeworthy or distasteful it wouldn't be on our shelves.
There is a point for "Meh" for the hyped books......although my head won't get around the fact that if a book is Meh, it wouldn't be recommended by us and, therefore, wouldn't be on our bookshelves.
No matter how popular the book, if it's a meh or less, I personally wouldn't put it on the bookshelf.

I guess we need to define the purpose of our bookshelf. What would we like to see listed?
1. every book we read? (I see this as onerous and perhaps not helpful in future browsing of the bookshelf)
2. only the books we truly liked, loved, thought brilliant (that would be 3 rating levels, all of them of a "recommended" value).
3. ? anything else?

Magdelanye, I would agree that The Waves was VW's most marvelous book (of those I've read so far). It was amazing.

We should remember that the person who adds/recommends a book for the bookshelf is the one who rates it. The rest of us use that rating as a reference when deciding whether to read the book or not.
We could then open discussions on the book, if we so please or wish to (or not, as would be the case at most times).

ETA: I hope I'm not coming across as pushing an agenda. I am trying to get a feel for what our group wants as a whole and thinking how to make our bookshelf reflect that.
Naturally, my personal thoughts are a part of the discussion but I'm not pushing it as "my way or the highway". My favorite decisions are always group based. I find those the strongest and best.

Petra wrote: "My take is that if a book is truly cringeworthy or distasteful it wouldn't be on our shelves.
There is a point for "Meh" for the hyped books......although my head won't get around the fact that if..."

this may be a delicate point. I'm interested in what others think as I do feel like it is fitting to have okay maybe just one shelf for books we recommend to avoid. Again, it might be too difficult and too much like censorship.
A wide range of subject matter and a place for controversy?

You are not being pushy, its great that you are excited

Thank you, Magdelanye.

A good point. The shelves should be what works for all of us. Each of us can take from them what we need/want.

Censorship is always an issue. However, a rating is a personal thing and not meant to censor anything and, therefore, a bad rating on our shelves (or a good one) is no guarantee or incentive/push to read or not read it.

We can leave the ratings shelves (7 in total) and see what happens.

I would suggest that anyone adding a book ensures that the book is one the following shelves:
1. Read (assumption: the person has read the book)
2. a rating shelf
3. a classification shelf. If such a shelf doesn't exist already, we can add it.

Therefore, each book would be listed, rated and found on a shelf when we're looking for a specific type of read.

For example:
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: read, 5-star, laughable

Okay....I've just come up with a possible problem by adding the example above:

the 5-star rating is my personal rating from the GR 5 star point system.
We have 7 shelves and would have to adjust our 5-star rating to a 7-star system.
Would this be a problem for anyone? It may not be intuitive (it wasn't for me just now)

Using the 7-star system, I would add the book as such:

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: read, 5-star (very good), laughable

For this book it made no difference but would some 6 or 7 star books be misclassified as a 5 star by mistake?

Just wondering. Something for us to ponder.

I think a 7-star rating would be a bit cumbersome. What about a plus/minus system?

I do feel that if we only had 3-star ratings and above that would be enough of a recommendation system but "cringeworthy" would be kind of funny. Although they would, for me, also be 1-star rated books.

I love The Waves although I'm addicted to To the Lighthouse which I've read several times.

I've been mulling it over and I think our system would work if the person entering the book added it to the three shelves: Read, Rating, Classification/Genre
That way, if looking for a good book, one can look at the ratings shelves and browse them. If one is looking for a specific topic (ie: laughable), one can browse that particular shelf.
All entered books would be on one of the ratings shelves or on a classification/genre shelf. No books are overlooked when browsing.
Currently, the books that are merely "read" would be overlooked and only seen if someone were browsing our entire bookshelf. Over time, that would become onerous. Therefore, many books now listed would never be seen and are, therefore, merely clutter (no matter how great they are to read).

We do seem to have a lot of "bad book" rating levels. How would this work for everyone:

Stars-1-Cringeworthy/Meh: any book we really disliked or DNF.
NOTE: it's a personal choice as to whether such a book is added. It would be fun to see which book so unfavorably affected one of us enough to add it to this shelf.
This rating level would be our current "Yuck" shelf.

Stars-2-Good Enough: any book we liked but that didn't stand out......a pleasant, entertaining book but not earth shaking.
(a GR 3-star level?)

Stars-3-Very-Good: a book that touched us in some way. It'll be a book we remember for some reason.
(a GR 4-star level?)

Stars-4- Wonderful: a book that is perfect. It has everything
(a GR 5-star level?)

Stars-5- Brilliant: beyond perfect. Truly one of a kind. Rare.


This removes our "Bleh" and "Meh" shelves (what I suspect are our 2-star reads).
Reasoning: would we "recommend" a bleh/meh book? These fall between the cracks of "warning" (cringeworthy) and good reads in terms of recommending to others. They are the truly forgettable books.
We might "recommend" a cringeworthy book as a warning, would possibly "recommend" a good-enough book, would most likely recommend a very good book and would most certainly recommend a wonderful or brilliant book.

I suspect most of our recommendations would fall in the Star-2 and Star-4 range, which are good, solid reads. It would make the Star-5 books stand out as stupendously good and the Star-1 books stand out as stupendously bad.

I guess I was assuming that everyone was familiar with my 7 point rating system outlined in my profile. It seems as if Ellie finds it cumbersome and Petra seems freaked by the bleh and meh which to me really can't be merged . I devised 7 points because 10 is too much and 5 inadequate to give an accurate assessment imo. I find myself giving mostly 4 and 5 anyways.I fret about books like the last one I reviewed that I bumped up to 4 because it is not an average book not great writing but great effort. Does that make sense?
I do like the + and - tho. and in fact Petras 5 point system is better than GRs.
But somewhere Ellie said I think that she doesnt care about ratings. I am okay with rating a book but I dont think there need to be dedicated shelves
The reason why we have so many read books on the shelf Petra is that its the simplest way to enter them. I'm not sure if we can get around that.
There is actually not even a fiction shelf! maybe it would be most useful to have a few few shelves classical, contemporary, native, black, international. Travel and adventure is missing as well
cheers

I'm okay with whatever rating system the group wants. I can adapt. :D
Just throwing out suggestions to adapt to what's being discussed so that we can discuss the options.

Magdelanye, perhaps I am not understanding the intention of the bookshelf.
I thought the idea was to recommend books we enjoyed and sort them on the shelves so that we can find books to match our mood. If this is true, not having the book on a shelf (except the "read" shelf) would make it invisible in our searches.

If the idea is to add a book we enjoyed, then the "read" shelf is fine. It's a less organized way but it works (unless we are looking for something specific).

As said, I may be mistaken on the intention of the bookshelf. If I take on this task, I'd like to work towards what the group wants so that the bookshelf is used.

Books can be on more than one shelf.
the category read is rather obligatory

I agree. All my read books are on more than one shelf. I think read is just a notation to myself about myself and not about the book.