Notes of Life

Below is another of my reviews which I have posted on Dooyoo and I recommend the website to anyone who loves books!

GoodReads.com is a social networking website designed to meet the needs of book readers. It’s free to join and members can share their list of books, rate & review books, as well as finding out about authors, book events (such as book signings), book trivia and more.

I found out about GoodReads.com through a Miss M’s blog and decided to check it out. I have shelves and piles of books and thought that the website would be a useful tool to keep track of what I have and haven’t got etc, so I signed up (which was easy and required minimal information, and GoodReads.com promise not to send spam or sell email addresses). I added Miss M to my GoodReads.com friends list and checked to see if any of my other friends were members of the website as well as inviting one or two friends. Inviting friends is easy and can be done in a couple of different ways… Friends can be added from your email account’s address book (if you are with a provider such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL), as well as from Facebook, Twitter or Plaxo. I didn’t want to send out a mass of invites (especially to friends who aren’t interested in reading) so I chose the manual option where by you simply type in their email address to check if they’re a member, and if they aren’t then you click the button to send them an invite.

Adding books to your book list (in the “My Books” section) is easy too… For books I had to hand I simply typed in their ISBN (found with the barcode on the back of the book) into the search bar and added the book, selecting whether I was to-read it, I’d read it or was currently reading it. It’s as simple as that! However, you can also add other details such as how many stars out of 5 you would give it after reading it, whether you want to add it to a certain bookshelf (for example: I’ve created a bookshelf called “Auto-biographies” because I read a fair few of them), a review, when you started/finished reading the book, how many times you’ve read it, who you’d recommend it to, when you bought it etc. You can add as little or as much detail as you want about each book. There are other ways of adding books, not just by ISBN… You can search for a particular book title or author, and if you can’t find a particular book on GoodReads.com you can use the search tool to search via Amazon (US, UK, Fr etc!) or Barnes & Noble. You can also manually add a book to the GoodReads.com database… especially handy if you’re a publisher or author, or you can import books using a couple of different methods. Once books are on your list, you can edit it’s review/details etc at a later date and friends can leave comments on them.

You can also use GoodReads.com to find out about a book you’d like to read or maybe search a genre to find recommended books to read. You can see how others have rated them as well as reviews for the books. For example… Going to the “Find Books” section and selecting the “Biography” genre will take you to a list of popular biography books – this page current shows 1-50 of 20,979 biography books, so there isn’t a shortage of books to look for! These biography books range from “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” to “Born Standing Up: A Comics Life” by Steve Martin. Well, think of a biography and it’s probably in there. I’ve not yet failed to find any book I’ve been searching for.

Clicking the “Popular” tab under “Find Books” will take you to a page showing the books most read this week, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, this week is showing up “Twilight” and “New Moon” by Stephenie Meyer. The section also lists popular books in general, unpopular books, new releases this month and new releases this year.

Also under the “Find Books” section is the “Giveaways” page – this is where people, authors and publishers giveaway a number of books (sometimes it’s just 1, other times it’s a handful). Often these books being given away are pre-releases… The whole idea of it all is that if you win a book they would like you to add it to your list when you receive it and then rate & review it when you’ve read it (as a little promotion for them). There is no obligation to do this if you do win a book, but I think it would help you win another if you were to do so. Each giveaway will tell you how many copies of that book are available to win and how many people have entered so far. You don’t have to answer any questions, you simply enter into whatever giveaways you like… providing your country is listed in the availability… and submit your address (which you will have entered when joining the website). There are loads of giveaways at any one time. Now, I only joined GoodReads.com over Christmas/New Year (2009/2010) and I’ve already won one of the giveaways! I know, I was surprised too! I won a book called “The Optimist: One Man’s Search for the Brighter Side of Life” by Laurence Shorter and I received the book in the mail the day after I received the email telling me I’d won. I’m currently in the middle of reading another book at the moment, but as I won this book it will be jumping to next in the queue so I can rate and review it for GoodReads.com.

There is also a discussion area in the “Find Books” section where books can be discussed (obviously!), but I haven’t participated in that side of things yet. The “Find Books” section is also home to an Ebooks area where various ebooks can be downloaded in a variety of formats (PDF, MP3 etc), these are also free!

Other parts of the website include the never-ending book quiz (which is good for when you’ve nothing better to do!), authors (including blog posts, interviews etc), videos (film trailers, author interviews etc), writing (why not share your own stories and poems), event listings and book swaps (although this section is currently only available in the US, but I believe they are working to get it running in other countries). You can also join a number of book groups through the website.

As I’m sure you can tell from my review, there is a lot to this website (I’d be here for a long time writing about every detail!). GoodReads.com is THE definitive book website/social network in my opinion and I could talk about it all day!

In design terms, this website is simple (which is good due to the amount of content it holds), yet it still looks up-to-date and is simple to use. I have had no problems in finding my way around the website or in using it. If members (or would-be members) do have any problems then there is a help section and the link for this can be found at the base of each page, however I have not felt the need to use it.

All in all, I highly recommend GoodReads.com to anyone with an interest in books. Whether you’re a casual reader or an avid reader of books, GoodReads.com provides not only a useful tool, but a useful social network… and who knows, you may win a book too!

You can check the website out at GoodReads.com or this link will add you to my friends list when you join.

Mika having a kip!

This photo was taken with my new mobile phone (Sony Ericsson W995) and hasn’t come out bad, considering. I was reading a book (Strange Brew (Edited by P. N. Elrod)) and Mika came and curled up by me on the bed, so I couldn’t resist reaching across for my phone to take a photo.

The snow that first fell before Christmas and continued until this past week has now all but gone. The fields and hills are now green with just patches of white. The only thing now that it’s melting is that there’s water all over the place… I just hope it doesn’t freeze again just yet!

My migraine/headache has gone too. However, I now have a cold in it’s place! What next?

Photo posted for Camera Critters.

The bad weather continues, making it difficult to get to work. Yesterday morning I worked from home and finally made it in at lunchtime. However, we had a lot more snow last night and this morning, meaning going to work wasn’t advisable today (especially as our county council is running low on grit and have decided not to grit minor roads and some main ones – despite the county being a rural, hilly one!).

Yesterday morning Dad ended up nursing a little robin. It had flown into the living room window and dropped into the snow dazed. So Dad rushed outside and brought the robin back into the warm, making sure neither of the 2 cats were in the room! We gave it some food and within half an hour or so the robin felt well enough to fly off, which was good to see.

It’s expected to freeze tonight, so tomorrow morning could be fun…….

Happy New Year to you! I hope you’ve had a great start to the 2010. My start to the year hasn’t been brilliant and we’re only a few hours in. It’s a long story, but suffice to say the messenger got shot… repeatedly… and I was the messenger! Nevermind…

My migraine has reared it’s ugly head again (I suspect that’s due to me getting wound up!), so I went out for a walk earlier. It froze last night so the snow is now crunchy and anything wet has turned to ice, so it was a bit treacherous underfoot. The walk turned out to be a good idea though. Not only did it clear my head a bit, but something also made me smile… This one-eyed snowman!

Before I go, I’d like to recommend a visit to Lorrie’s Illusio Creative blog. Lorrie is a visual artist and she is doing a blog giveaway. So get yourself over there and you could be in the running to win FOUR FREE A5 PRINTS, AND a set of FOUR FREE POSTCARDS! As you’ll see from Lorrie’s work, she’s a wonderful artist and a generous one at that!

Happy New Year!