It’s not long since I updated The Boar’s Head Bookshelf, and mooted the idea of doing something different, more useful with it: ‘useful‘ being defined as:
- up to date;
- accurate;
- easier to search through; and
- helpful in signposting, NOT gatekeeping or showing off – especially for students, taking some of the leg-work out of their research
So …
[drum roll]
The bookshelf is slowly, inexorably, on the move. If you listen carefully, you might be able to hear the creaking from where you are.
It’s only workload that’s stopped me from putting together some kind of database, which is just as well: realistically, I had one in operation all along that probably just needed fine-tuning. Why reinvent the wheel, after all?
So, the new bookshelf can be found … here, at Goodreads … a new account just for the Boar’s Head.
Before you click on the link, let me ‘sell’ it to you:
- better ‘bookshelving’ of what I’ve read, so you aren’t scrolling through an alphabetical list of potentially meaningless author names;
- more accurate details about the book in terms of ISBN, etc, if you want to buy one yourself;
- a more complete sense of what I have and haven’t read;
- pictures of the covers, where available;
- twitter notifications, if you follow me, every time I add something to the shelves, rather than the occasional shelf-dump – you’re as up to date as I am; and
- better reviews by yours truly
‘Better reviews?’
Well, what I mean by that is that as I add NEW books, they’ll all get a ‘proper’ review. Older books – those I have already read – will get something more comprehensive than the treatment they’ve received here on an as-and-when basis.
‘Proper reviews?’
By way of a taster, here’s the first paragraph of the review of the book I finished today: Helen Castor‘s Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity (Penguin Monarchs)
Helen Castor is – despite the title – sensibly objective in this short but useful biography of Elizabeth. Early on, she admits that the queen was almost unknowable to her subjects and rivals, let alone to us from a distance of over 300 years.
As I add content to the new ‘shelf’, I’ll remove it from the current page, so that I can keep track of what is where. Increasingly, and it WILL take a while, the most useful stuff will be on the new page.
OK, so here’s the link again: Boars Head @ Goodreads. Get over there and – importantly – interact, please: let me know you’ve been over, provide feedback on my reviews, suggestions of your own about what I should be reading, or simply random observations.
Come and say hi …
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 