Delicious books

We're learning about Web 2.0 at work, so this blog will combine happy book suggestions AND information about new web technologies for a while. (Sounds serious- so I added a delicious donut to keep your attention!) This week, I'm looking at the website bookmarking program called Delicious. At Delicious.com you can search for websites with keywords, called tags, and organize lists of favourites URLs.

I'm curious about reducing a book to a list of single keywords. As a librarian, I'm used to a controlled list of hierarchical subjects. This site is organized by random keywords supplied by the users. (That's not a judgement- I'm a big fan of randomness!) I'm going to try to boil down some happy book club choices to keywords...

Here are some happy nonfiction books:

The City of Falling Angels / John Berendt
Venice Italy Fenice opera arson characters MidnightintheGardenofGoodandEvil glassblower

Dropped Threads: What we aren't told / edited by Carol Shields
Essays women Canada young old discussion personal popular accessible

Outliers : The Story of Success / Malcolm Gladwell
Tippingpoint Blink success practice 10,000hours thoughtprovoking easyread

The Perfection of the Morning : An Apprenticeship in Nature / Sharon Butala
meditative nature lyrical Saskatchewan mixedreaction ranching spiritual nonlinear

Eat, Pray, Love / Elizabeth Gilbert
travel Italy India Indonesia Bali spiritual funny diary anecdotal easyread


I'm having a hard time describing what these books are about! How do I describe the mixed love/hate reaction of our book club to Sharon Butala's Perfection of the Morning? I like that you can include different information than the usual subjects you find in the library catalogue, like tone and read alikes. But, for my book reviews, I think I'll stick to sentences!


It makes me wonder about group think. If many people like a website, will I like it too? Do the tagging decisions of millions of people cause the best content to rise to the top? That's how I pick videos to watch on Youtube. Can I trust strangers, or might they have a business interest in what they're promoting? Sometimes word of mouth causes a book to expolode, and everyone reads it. Will digital word of mouth explode?

Delicious is a good place to keep track of your personal or work websites, but not the place to search for book reviews. At least not yet! Happy reading.

Blogging and food and time- oh my!

For work, I'm to write about blogging. That makes me think of reading Julie and Julia for bookclub. It's a blog turned into a book about a New York secretary who vows to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We all liked it, although as in the subsequent movie with Meryl Streep, we preferred the bits about Julia Child.

What I didn't like was cooking pastries for the snacks, although now I rather enjoy the anecdote about the two days it took me to prepare one single item, a cheese pastry. That pastry wasn't to be cooked all at once, no, it had to take regular vacations in the fridge to chill out.

A much luckier host landed Miriam Toew's A Complicated Kindness. Since it is set in a small Mennonite town our hostess served us Spam. Yes, she really made an effort. Actually no one would touch it. However, we did touch another Toew's novel, The Flying Troutmans because we enjoy her wacky fictional families. Plus it's our Canadian content, since most Canadians don't write happy, funny stories.

Really, the food is half the draw in bookclub. I am trying to think of a book to host which would feature some jello salads. We have some phenomenal cooks who lay on a spread. Which leads me to the topic of the time needed to prepare all that food, which leads me to what I am supposed to be doing with my time right now, which is to write about blogging for work.

I'm to write about what intrigues me about social media. It intrigues me how anyone has the ability to keep up with their email, their Facebook and Twitter accounts, their blog, and still cook fabulous spreads for bookclub. Oh right, I remember, it's because we don't always finish the books!