Early this year I was look­ing for an online book­shelf to man­age my books. It had to be online so that I could access it at a whim from every­where. I did some research and I dis­cov­ered Shel­fari which I’ve been using for almost a year now. Since then Shel­fari has come a long way. The folks over there did an awe­some job and I’m glad to have found the site. I’m using it quite fre­quently these days – though I have yet to add all my books – and I thought it’s time to praise the service.

Shel­fari fea­tures an appeal­ing design and is very easy to use, as long as you don’t use the more sophis­ti­cated func­tions. Search­ing for books is very easy and you can do so by title, author name, or ISBN. Since they have access to Amazon’s data­base your searches only rarely come up with noth­ing. After you found a spe­cific book you can add it to your per­sonal library with a sim­ple click. Addi­tion­ally, you can pro­vide some infor­ma­tion on the book, e. g., whether you own the book or not, how much it cost you, your review, tags, and so on. Some of the addi­tional infor­ma­tion is pri­vate and only you can see it. Read more…

Dur­ing the recent work on my blog I thought that I could come up with some kind of library sec­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, that was eas­ier said than done. I tried to come up with a solu­tion to dis­play all the books I own – well, at least the Eng­lish ones – but I couldn’t fig­ure out how to make it user friendly and well arranged. So, I was brows­ing the inter­net look­ing for inspi­ra­tion when I stum­bled over an online book­shelf. Where there’s one, there are usu­ally more. A quick search ended with a few pos­si­ble solutions.

The first online book­shelf I found is called Library­Thing. I imme­di­ately signed up and tried a few things. Unfor­tu­nately, I dis­cov­ered dur­ing the reg­is­tra­tion process that you can only add up to 200 books for free. If you want more books, you have to pay $10  a year or $25 once. I gladly pay for ser­vices ren­dered but I don’t like to pay for some­thing that doesn’t suit my needs. I have to say, though, that Library­Thing is easy to use, offers lots of lan­guages and scan­ner sup­port. Yeah, well … I decided to do a lit­tle more research.

GuruLib is the next site I dis­cov­ered. After sign­ing up I found that this one offer a quite exten­sive data­base. It’s very user friendly too but it looks quite dull. Inter­est­ingly enough, GuruLib isn’s specif­i­cally for books. One can also use it to man­age movies, music, games and soft­ware. It’s nice enough and it’s free but it looks way too spar­tan to me. So, off I was to check out the next one.

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… should be fun. One shouldn’t write a book if it means hard work (look­ing up some facts hardly counts as hard work here). I always wanted to write at least one book and have it on a best­seller list. Nice dream, you say? Well, I know I’m good at writ­ing if I set my mind to it. Don’t let my not so per­fect com­mand of the Eng­lish lan­guage fool you into believ­ing that I’m bad with words. I have been good at writ­ing in my native lan­guage in the past and I won’t do bad in the future. That’s a fact.

I should start right now because I’ve planned to start writ­ing before I turn 26. There’s only one prob­lem: I don’t know what to write about. Sounds crazy, eh? You see, I got shit­loads of ideas in my head and I sim­ply can’t pick one. Of course, I don’t have every­thing planned in advance but I have already a very rough out­line for every story I want to bring to paper. Right now, in this very moment, I’m try­ing to set­tle for the plot I’d like to explore the most, thanks to my multi-​​tasking capabilities.

Inter­est­ingly enough, Evil Spock rec­om­mended the TV show Heroes not too long ago and since I’ve fin­ished it my mind is filled with new ideas. In fact, I feel like Peter Petrelli – like not being able to con­tain all my thoughts. I try and I try, but they des­per­ately wanna get outta my head, with explod­ing force. To accom­mo­date my writ­ing skills and my future pub­lish­ers, I will have to invent the Brain­link, enabling me to com­mu­ni­cate with my com­puter wire­lessly by thought only …

It truly is. But that’s not exactly some­thing knew I pulled out of my magic hat. There’s the Small World Project and the Small World Exper­i­ment to prove that. In short, exper­i­ments showed that the aver­age path length for social net­works of peo­ple in the United States is about six. Inter­est­ing stuff but only mildly related to what I’m aim­ing at.

I stum­bled over – mind you, Stum­ble­Upon really sucks – an inter­est­ing site that may prove use­ful to me. It’s some­thing called Literature-​​Map. Some guys gath­ered some infor­ma­tion on authors and writ­ers and cre­ated an intrigu­ing map because “the closer two writ­ers are, the more likely some­one will like both of them”. Pro­vides a great method to get to know new writ­ers, I guess. At least, it sounds bet­ter than scour­ing dif­fer­ent forums for some recommendations …

It really is, I promise. Yeah, I’ve been away for some time but I had to spend some days with my par­ents, cel­e­brat­ing my grandma’s 90th birth­day. Any­way, long time no post. And so I asked myself what would pos­si­bly be worth some com­plain­ing? At first, I didn’t come up with some­thing inter­est­ing but then, all of a sud­den, a recent expe­ri­ence just invaded my cur­rent train of thought: Buy­ing a book. I like to read and read a lot, lit­er­ally scores of books a year. I pre­fer Fan­tasy and Sci-​​Fi because that’s where there are no bound­aries. The only limit is imposed by the author of the respec­tive book and that’s why any author in these gen­res can let his imag­i­na­tion loose.

Unfor­tu­nately, I’m a bit picky. You know, been there, read that. I’d like to read some­thing new and I seri­ously dis­like – hate would be to strong an emo­tion for fic­ti­tious things, wouldn’t it? – read­ing the nth install­ment of the same old plot cre­ated by Tolkien, for instance. I don’t like the clas­sic good vs. evil sto­ries either and I can’t, for the life of me, fig­ure out why so much of the epic fantasy/​sci-​​fi stuff has to be so homo­ge­neous. Thus, I can’t just walk into the next book store, take a look around and buy a bunch of books. If it only were so easy.

I reg­u­larly scout the local book­store for new mind food but that’s all there is to it. I don’t buy thin books and I sel­dom buy sin­gle nov­els. I like epics and that almost always involves three or more vol­umes. Any­way, I gather some intel, take some pho­tographs and then it’s up to my usu­ally reli­able source of infor­ma­tion, the inter­net, to help me make my deci­sion. I check out sffworld.com and the forum for reviews and some addi­tional thoughts. I like to see some fel­low read­ers to actu­ally rec­om­mend or damn the book in ques­tion. It’s not that I don’t take chances. Some­times I for­get all about these “rules of buy­ing” and just grab a book that looks inter­est­ing to me. The odds are fifty-​​fifty and that’s the usual result of pick­ing books with­out fur­ther investigation.

I’ve tor­tured myself over the past few weeks because I’m run­ning out of stuff. I needed some new input and I had to look really hard to come up with some books. First off, I was able to grab a copy of The Fate of the Fallen, Vol­ume One of The Song of the Tears – Ian Irvine’s con­tin­u­a­tion of the Three Worlds Cycle. Arguably one of the best series in the whole fan­tasy genre. Next I chose Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover to accom­pany the rest of my sci-​​fi nov­els. Finally, my Ama­zon order was con­cluded by R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Noth­ing series. I don’t know much about this one but I hope it’ll end in a pleas­ant sur­prise. For now, I’m already look­ing for­ward to hav­ing these books in my pos­ses­sion

Just last week I started to read a new series called The Sword of Truth. Quite intrigu­ing, I have to admit but it’s start­ing to become repet­i­tive and slow-​​turning. I almost regret hav­ing bought the first six books in advance. Cur­rently, I’m in the very midst of vol­ume four. I’ve tasted enough to buy the rest because I sim­ply want to know how the story unfolds.A very inter­est­ing con­cept is the intro­duc­tion of a new Wizard’s rule with every new vol­ume. In this series only wiz­ards know about them and try to live by them. A com­plete list of these rules can be found here. I like these rules, they seem to be cre­ated by sim­ply look­ing into life itself and Terry Good­kind seems to make them up as he walks along.

• Wizard’s First Rule: “Peo­ple are stu­pid. They will believe any­thing they want to be true or fear to be true.”
• Wizard’s Sec­ond Rule: “The great­est harm can result from the best intentions.”
• Wizard’s Third Rule: “Pas­sion rules reason.”

Well, these rules are truly worth know­ing. Espe­cially if one doesn’t live in a fic­ti­tious world, one should know about them. They can pro­vide guid­ance for some of us. I knew them all before and I know them today because I learned the hard way. For instance, I use the First Rule to bet­ter under­stand other peo­ple. One can learn from everything …