100 Books in 366 Days - Bookshelves Explained

Bibliographies at the University Library of Graz (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who had been following my 100 books in 366 days probably has drifted over to my Goodreads.com page.  And, undoubtedly, you probably have seen the shear number of different book categories that I have represented as bookshelves.  Given the shear number of bookshelves on there, I thought I would explain what some of them are.

The Main Five

• Read – These are all the books I have read.  At least, all of the books I’ve read that I’ve registered on here.  There are a great number of gaping holes in this list since I have actually read SO many books.  The list will generally show when I finished the books after I started using Goodreads, which allows me to keep track of what books I finished in what month.
• Currently-reading – These are the books I have in progress.
• To-read – These are the books I am looking to read and have in my possession, either as physical editions, or as e-books.  You can actually ignore the sorting order, I never actually use it for anything.
• Cannot-read-anymore – These are the books that I could not stand to read, so much so that I stopped reading them.  At the moment, only one book has this dubious distinction.
• Wish-list – These are the books I want to read, but have yet to attain a copy in some form or another.  This list was created as a reaction to the Barnes & Noble wish list glitch, which prevented a lot of people from accessing their nook book wish lists on the web site.  This list is by no means complete, and will most likely grow more and more as I go.

The above five are exclusive lists, meaning that a book I flagged on Goodreads.com can appear in only one of the above bookshelves.  This does not mean that the books on this cannot appear on any other list (or lists), it just means that Book A cannot appear on “read” and “to-read” at the same time.

The Others

The rest of the bookshelves on my page fall into these categories.  Most of these bookshelves fall along genre (sci-fi, horror, history, mystery), publisher (mostly among the graphic novels) or in some cases characters (Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, etc), but there are a few that stand out for clarification.

• Alternate-history – These are the books that take history as we know it and turn it on end.  Most of these titles fall into the sci-fi category because of the nature of the subject matter.
• Big-book-of - This is a listing of the Big Book Of series that DC Comics released under their former imprint, Paradox Press.
• Dystopia – From The Hunger Games to V For Vendetta, these are the stories about things going bad for us politically and socially.
• End-of-the-world – This is the end of everything as we know it, whether it be from nuclear annihilation, disease, zombies, or alien invasion.  The world may go on, but it is certainly not the one that we all know.
• High-strangeness – A phrase taken from Coast To Coast AM, this covers all the unusual stuff that just cannot be neatly classified, from conspiracy theories, ghosts, psychic powers and cryptids.
• Lost-worlds – Stories of hidden realms long isolated from civilization.
• Shared-worlds – Shared worlds are a special kind of anthology, usually set up with a central premise to which a number of different writers would work on.  Each would create different characters which could be used by other writers (with some restrictions).  The Wild Cards series is one of the major series in this style.
• Showcase-presents – A collection of DC Comics Showcase Presents line, reprinting a number of series on black and white newsprint.

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• E-Books and Bookshelves (whendotheyservethewine.com)
• Have you Discovered Goodreads? (anyonething.wordpress.com)
• How to Make Exclusive Shelves on Goodreads (thecheapreader.wordpress.com)
• How to Let Go: When Your Bookshelf Has Run Out of Space (christiansread.wordpress.com)