Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

(At the culmination of a long and rambling discourse about W. H. Auden, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, pameladean, and the deficiencies of the new library catalog system)
Me: But I thought it might amuse her, and so I shared.
timprov: Can we make that your Latin motto? And put it in a coat of arms?
Me: I'm fine with that. I will tell livejournal. Some of them know Latin.

Four rejections this week. They all came between midnight and noon on Wednesday: quick! So we can say we replied in May! or something like that.

I have a problem with my library list. Specifically, it is five closely handwritten pages, and it is not sorted. (And that five-page figure does not include, for example, the two yhlee-recommended books I just added to the file of things to look up on the library's online catalog when I get the chance.) So when I'm in the mood for something specific -- mysteries, say, or YA mainstream, or popular science writing -- there's absolutely no telling where on the list the relevant listings will be. And somehow, sitting down and organizing the library list -- and rewriting it, uff da -- has not made the priority list recently. (Complaining about the problem on lj, apparently, is of a much higher priority.)

Also -- and this is a problem that goes beyond my immediate laziness -- there are some books whose category is not clear to me, or possibly never was. I wrote, "G.K. Chesterton -- The Man Who Was Thursday -- Hilary -- Mys C42," very clearly. Did I write it down as a mystery or as some other category of thing? I don't know. It's good to know whether mechaieh or wshaffer was the source of a recommendation, but it's not always as informative a tag as I would like.

(What I really want, now that I've gone through all the Dorothy Dunnetts and also all the Patrick O'Brians and also all the Sharon Kay Penmans, is historical novels -- preferably chewy juicy thick ones -- wherein the author has done a ton of research, and I can't pick out what specific books the author has or, more to the point, hasn't read, and also wherein the author does not think that the period and location are exotic. Interesting, sure. Exciting, sure. But exotic, no, no thank you. And that's not just about Chinoiserie and its related diseases, either -- it also applies to the historical writers who are just breathless about the idea that someone might have a farthingale, my goodness, imagine!)

Also -- this part isn't a problem at all -- I can tell how long some things have been on my library list, because there's a line beyond which the tag stops being rysmiel and starts being [rysmiel's real first name], and one when mkille stops being "M.Kille" and starts being "O.Mark" (short for "Other Mark," when he became definitively the other Mark I would refer to and any other other Marks would require additional tags). "P.Dean" means that pameladean mentioned something positively in her lj or one of her books, before she was just the Pamela to me. This is fine as a personal historical artifact, but then I look at it and think, gosh, I really have a lot of reading I haven't gotten to. I did get to the former oldest item on the list, which I could date precisely because skzbrust only came to do a reading at my college once, and then I didn't speak to him again until the Minicon after we moved home. Now I don't know what the oldest item on the library list is. But it's less recent than the fall of '98, I do know that much!

Maybe I should have gone to the library before it closed.