Arctangential

I want to talk about my book system.

I guess it’s kind of a conceit that anybody will care about it, but there aren’t many aspects of LiveJournal writing that can’t be called a conceit at some level or another, so I guess I’ll press on. The basic idea behind my book system is that of fairness — mainly to books. What I mean is, I feel bad if I buy a book, or somebody gives me a book, and it ends up just sitting on my shelf for too long not being read. I feel like that book is being marginalized somehow.

So if I just left things to my own choice at the time of choosing a new book to read, books will get ignored all the time, especially if the book doesn’t seem very exciting or if maybe I think it’s going to suck. Or especially if I know it’s going to suck. So the key is random choice. It’s only fair if the book I’m to read is chosen at random from the available books — then one book won’t be shown preference over another for any reason. When I was younger and my “to-read pile” of books was more manageable, I had a reasonably simple system of dice-rolling that allowed me to select books at random from reasonably small selections. For example, if I had 15 books, I could roll a 10-sided die and a 6-sided die, add the results, subtract one and count down from the top of the pile. If I had 57 books, I would split the pile into 3 equal sections, use a 6-sided die to decide which pile to use, and then use a 20-sided die (ignoring 20s) to choose the book from the selected pile.

It was actually kind of fun figuring out the proper dice combinations, but as my book purchasing continued to outpace my book reading, and the “to-read” pile got bigger and bigger, eventually turning into a “to-read” shelf and ultimately into a “to-read” bookcase, the dice method got to be less and less viable. I also had fewer and fewer dice as I stopped playing role-playing games. Furthermore, I needed some way to keep track of all of my books, not just the ones I had yet to read — the current method of pieces of paper, a few text files on my computer, and one HTML file on my web site was also not scaling well to the ever-burgeoning book collection.

So we come to the current system. I have a relational database to describe all of the books I catalog. Each book can be in one of 4 states: “want to buy”, “can’t read yet”, “will read” and “have read”. I have a web-based interface on my home computer that lets me add books and maintain the database. I have two web pages, here and here, that I automatically generate from the database and, of course, I have a utility that randomly chooses which book I should read next.

Bah.