Happy days! It's December and the book ban is officially off for an entire month. The ban will be imposed once again when December is over or when I have no more money left (whichever comes sooner).

Reading update:
I have finished a good deal of my 2007 reading pile while sneaking in a quick reread of Lord of the Rings and an even quicker reread of The Golden Compass (a refresher of sorts before I watched the movie -- which I did yesterday!). And now the book pile is growing in height once again.

My purchases:
Finally found a paperback copy of Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier in Fully Booked and that's what I'm reading right now. It's a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy tale.

I also bought: Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger, Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke, and a silly little book called Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson.

The Moomin series caught my attention while browsing in the children's section of Fully Booked High Street, because the illustration style of the cover art looked so familiar. And the name of the author rang a bell. I took a quick shot of the book with my celphone so I could research about it online. Turns out my guess was correct. Tove Jansson did the illustrations for the Finnish edition of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit. I had stumbled upon her illustrations some time ago while browsing for Hobbit-related artwork. The Moomin books enjoy quite a following, it turns out. You can even find Moomintrolls on Flickr.

My LibraryThing
Now that I have more time, I've been updating my LibraryThing catalog. I've upgraded to a lifetime membership, too, because free Shelfari just does not cut it.

There's a better free alternative to Shelfari, though, if anyone's interested. My friend Val pointed me to anobii. It's a prettier site but its database is not as extensive as LT's just yet -- most titles only offer one cover art, and you have to upload different editions yourself. You can't manually add books, either, so if for some reason the site can't find your book's info, you can't add it at all. I've made an account there as well just for the heck of it (it's easy enough to import catalog data). But, my anobii shelf does not accurately reflect my books' editions. It also doesn't have my Nick Joaquin story books and a few other titles because they're not in their database.

But, all in all, if you're not particular about things like cover art and book editions, it's all right. In any case, it's much better than Shelfari and has that regular clean grid look and not the shelf look that Shelfari has which I do not like at all. The site's faster, too.

I'll go back to reading in a while (it's fun to wake up at 4am for no reason at all on a day when you have no work!), right after I browse the forums in LT.

Yey for December!

Labels: books