My god! I've borrowed a book !

 I've been maundering on about starting to use my local public library as more than a workspace, and actually borrowing books.

Well, this morning I got a nice email to say that one of the books I'd reserved had come in and so, in between buying fish (the fresh fish truck comes on Wednesdays) and a bit of shopping I dropped in to my local library and picked up my book.

Nothing remarkable, I'm sure lots of people do this all the time.

But this has caused me a little problem. My current method of managing books that I've bought to read is, let us say, a trifle chaotic

Basically, it's a case of dump them on top of the filing cabinet, then dissuade Lucy, our grey Tonkinese cat from trying to climb up and sit on them and gaze over the study in a regal manner.

Actually, it's bit more sophisticated than that, I do enter them into LibraryThing to avoid accidental duplicate purchases, but I'm not very sophisticated in my use of it.

LibraryThing lets you categorise books as belonging to collections such as ebooks, paper books, books from Project Gutenberg and the rest. It comes with some prerolled categories and you can make up additional ones that make sense to you, and also mark books as 'disposed of' etc.

Up till now I've not been that anal.

Books get entered anyhow, and get a star rating when I've read them. And up to now, being slack about how I used it has worked for me.

So, if I'm going to keep up this library borrowing thing, I need to be a little more sophisticated.

Library books I've borrowed go into a 'read but not owned' category when I pick them up on the expectation that I'll start on a borrowed book in a day or so of picking it up, and get a star rating when I've read them - hardly groundbreaking.

The other thing is to start a 'To read' list of books I intend to read. They may be borrowed from the library, bought second hand or new, or even bought from the big A for the kindle.

Up to now I've clipped book reviews from online magazines and book newsletters to evernote - not that bad a solution - but this lets me be a little more sophisticated and move items into new categories as I read them ...