Books and Memories

a little part of my shelf they can't take from me #martyr  

Does anyone else use Shelfari to track the books they read? No? Didn’t think so; that’s why Amazon is done running two similar sites and GoodReads is taking over. I signed up for GoodReads years ago but never really got into it. I might use it for reviews and recommendations, but I had to make myself log on and update my latest reads. 

Pretty soon after I started blogging, I saw the coolest thing on some other girls’ blog: a virtual bookshelf where you could see all the books she had read! I know, right! Talk about fetch! This was a total game changer; now I didn’t have to write up boring book reviews no one cared about, they could just scroll to the bottom of my blog and see my most recent reads. But let’s be honest, I still do book reviews b/c I need some type of regular content up in here. 

I signed on to Shelfari a few weeks ago to add some books I had just finished and saw a huge disclaimer across the top of the site announcing how they were merging w/ GoodReads. I felt like Charlie Brown after Lucy takes the football away; lying on my back confused and outraged and the wind knocked out of me. 

This is essentially a first-world problem, and an old-lady one at that; who even reads anymore, am I right? I just needed an outlet after spending hours transferring all my books from Shelfari to GoodReads. Sure, they can do it for you, but they don’t transfer in any kind of chronological order. One of the main reasons I like tracking what I read is so I can go back and see what I read that year.

Books are like music; for so many of them, I can go back and envision where I was, both literally where I read the book, and where I was at that point in my life. Whether it was still in college, the summer after graduation, the book I read while waiting for Brent on our first date, the book(s) I brought w/ us on the flight to Hawaii; these are more than books, they are memories. 

I’m devastated I won’t have them on my little Shalfari shelf anymore. GoodReads claims it’s the same thing, but better. I won’t hold my breath on that, but hopefully I’m proven wrong. They say the sites will be merged by the middle of March, so I’ve got a few more weeks to figure out a solution. Amazon doesn’t know the wrath of a woman whose online bookshelf is scorned.