So I’d been casually keeping a books read list since about 2017, after I got the brain chemistry stable. Unstable chemistry’d meant about a five-year reading drought, and my lists were more a way to mark off numbers of things read—to prove to myself and various highly brilliant professionals that yeah, the meds were slowly and surely doing their job and I could start to claw my way back toward a brainspace where getting an undergraduate—and maybe even graduate! Degree was possible.
But I still wasn’t, till the end of 2019, thinking of myself as someone who could interestingly and articulately book-babble at people, so the lists were A. rudimentary as fuck and B. a jumble in pages-long word docs. In the last half of 19, I started consciously shooting book recs at people, and to my unending if delighted surprise, they seemed to like ‘em, and I had an eclectic enough taste I could usually find something to satisfy about any craving—proud words goeth before a fall, and all that, and I’m bracing for someone to comment with some request that leaves me baffled. ;)
Fast-forward to 19’s tail-end, whereupon I thought: ooo, I’ll do a list of fav books. (as you can see, list still aint here, though it is forthcoming.) And then I hit the massive brick-wall; I had 82 things on a list in Word, with no links for short-fiction, no other real distinguishing notes, and just a column of numbers/titles/authors. Breaking that list down into a top 50 and then those fifty into draft posts of ten with actual interesting commentary’s been quite an undertaking in the spare bits of free time, complicated by rl-stuff. And it made me badly want a better solution.
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delphi had already gotten me thinking on spreadsheets with her post about ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout and their writing ones. It wasn’t a format I was terribly familiar with—I’d always had the vague premonition that putting in that much effort into curation would make reading feel like a chore. But I went faffing about, looking at templates and excel how-to’s.
And y’all: I think I’m in love with a form of data curation; feeling monogamous—or at the very least, inclined towards being serial. I’ve had a number of folks be fairly surprised it would appeal, considering the blindness, but even with the screen-reader, there’s something about arrowing through the orderly columns, watching the data pile up in neat stacks, and being able to go up to the top of each column to remember precisely what I wanted to make note of that has me swooning.
Below the cut’s as much of a template as DW’ll let me render: ( sample )
But I still wasn’t, till the end of 2019, thinking of myself as someone who could interestingly and articulately book-babble at people, so the lists were A. rudimentary as fuck and B. a jumble in pages-long word docs. In the last half of 19, I started consciously shooting book recs at people, and to my unending if delighted surprise, they seemed to like ‘em, and I had an eclectic enough taste I could usually find something to satisfy about any craving—proud words goeth before a fall, and all that, and I’m bracing for someone to comment with some request that leaves me baffled. ;)
Fast-forward to 19’s tail-end, whereupon I thought: ooo, I’ll do a list of fav books. (as you can see, list still aint here, though it is forthcoming.) And then I hit the massive brick-wall; I had 82 things on a list in Word, with no links for short-fiction, no other real distinguishing notes, and just a column of numbers/titles/authors. Breaking that list down into a top 50 and then those fifty into draft posts of ten with actual interesting commentary’s been quite an undertaking in the spare bits of free time, complicated by rl-stuff. And it made me badly want a better solution.
delphi had already gotten me thinking on spreadsheets with her post about getyourwordsout and their writing ones. It wasn’t a format I was terribly familiar with—I’d always had the vague premonition that putting in that much effort into curation would make reading feel like a chore. But I went faffing about, looking at templates and excel how-to’s.And y’all: I think I’m in love with a form of data curation; feeling monogamous—or at the very least, inclined towards being serial. I’ve had a number of folks be fairly surprised it would appeal, considering the blindness, but even with the screen-reader, there’s something about arrowing through the orderly columns, watching the data pile up in neat stacks, and being able to go up to the top of each column to remember precisely what I wanted to make note of that has me swooning.
Below the cut’s as much of a template as DW’ll let me render: ( sample )
