Here booky, booky, booky

[kerravonsen]

Acch. Aching back. I've done to the end of the C's.
I think I'd better give up cataloguing. It occurs to me that people will be coming by on Tuesday and I'd better not have books lying around in the hallway then. (sigh)
Ah well, this will probably be another one of these ambitious projects started with a burst of enthusiasm and then never heard of again.

On the other hand, I must remember the words of Duncan and Methos, when Methos was hanging up pages of books to dry (the bookstore cellar had gotten flooded):
Duncan: It will take you years to sort this out!
Methos: You say that like it's a bad thing.

Comments

Something to try

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

Boy, do I have sympathy for unfinished projects. And I haven't even started cataloguing my books, though it's been written on my to-do list for months! So good on you for starting.

But I once read what seems like a simple solution for this one. Put the books back on the shelf. Then when you have an evening to work on it, just pull out the D's and catalogue them, shift the unsorted ones down to make room, and put the D's back in order. Next time the E's, etc. And each successive letter is easier to pull and shift, because the choices narrow. If you do one or two evenings a week, it might go quicker than you think.

Alternatively, sort now, catalogue later on free evenings, if that seems easier.

Re: Something to try

[kerravonsen]

Thanks for the suggestions... but I've already sorted and shelved. I don't think it would even have occurred to me to shelve without sorting them, though this was trickier than usual, it being a kind of three-way merge, between the hardbacks (which were sorted) and the paperbacks (which were also sorted) and the miscelaneous unshelved new books (which were unsorted, and have been piling up for a while).

I just hope that the fact that the unread new books are all shelved now won't mean that I'll forget to read them. Then again, the fact that they were piled up hasn't seemed to encourage me to read them; it will always depend on what kind of thing I'm in the mood for anyway. Trying to read one that I'm not in the mood for is doomed to failure -- either a failure to read said book, a failure to enjoy said book, or even a failure to keep said book...
Being as much of a J as I am, I have to give myself permission to stop reading a book (being obsessed with finishing things). I use the 50-page rule that my old school librarian gave us: if you're still not interested in the story after you've read 50 pages, you can stop. Though I suspect that applies better to 300-page novels than 500-page ones, I've already come to the conclusion that 500-page novels tend to be too slow-moving and/or epic for me to enjoy anyway, so I might as well apply the 50-page rule to them too.