mef’s Comments (group member since Jan 19, 2016)

mef’s comments from the Crossroads group.

Can anybody help me understand the idea of shelves in Goodreads? I can make a shelf called Owns, for things I own but that aren't on the TBR for the foreseeable future and I have not read, but the minute I put the book on the Owns shelf, it gets marked Read. So...what am I doing wrong?

Okay, so...say I post this and forget where I posted a message (I'll know where this one is, but this just happened to me in a southern lit group here). I click on my avatar at the top right, and one of the menu items is "My Comments". I find my comment, with a clickable Name-of-group. I click on it--and am taken to post 1 of a thread with hundreds of posts. 44 pages of comments, in this case.

Is there a way to get GoodReads to present threads to me starting where I left off reading (like Shelfari did, ahem)?

Is there any way to add a book that you own but have not yet read, other than adding it to the "I plan to read" shelf? I don't 'get' Goodreads shelves yet. I wanted to use "I plan to read" for TBR (Once I get rid of all of the books added way back, years ago, when I first tried the site and couldn't get it out of the mode of "would you like to read these? How about these? And these?")

Got three new books and gave up trying to add the two I wasn't reading yet.

So...the conversation here isn't really taking off, is it? Or am I in the wrong place?

Great. Wanted to reply that and quote the line "I'd better go check out Leafmark" but GR won't let me; it insists I include the quote from Lesley that I quoted in the message above.

Yes, it takes time to learn any system new to you. But why doesn't the "include the material I have selected, as a quote in my reply" work in messages further down the chain??? WHY DOES NOTHING EVER, EVER WORK RIGHT?

Ahem, sorry.

Speaking of which, I said (thought GR won't put this into my message header here as a quotation): "I'd better go check out Leafmark".

And I tried.

My system suggested I wanted Leafmark.co.uk, which turns out to sell decorative products made with real leaves. Silly me--

I tried to go to Leafmark.com

My security software tells me the site is dangerous and it doesn't want me to go there.

It is just Leafmark.com, right??

Lesley wrote: "Lesley wrote: "Most of my stars didn't arrive.. Can't be bothered to look into it at the mo... Real life probs here (not just tennis)"
GR helper Arturo sent me simple instructions on how to import ..."

Is there any chance that GoodReads has posted these simple instructions anywhere, or does that make too much sense?

Would you, Lesley, be willing please to post these magical instructins, maybe?

Does anybody know whether there's a group for discussing moving-in-from-Shelfari issues?

I think I'm to the point I'd better go check out Leafmark. Yeah, I have time for that...

It is very, very odd that the data that came over for people is so hit-or-miss. Long ago and far away when I wrote database software for a living, I knew about such things, and now I really don't, but I'm left with the firm opinion that for them to drop stars and books here and there is *extremely* odd. I just don't see how that could happen; computers are good at things like "take all of this data and copy it over here"--and when such an operation fails, you normally get gibberish. The process doesn't normally leave...data crumbs scattered on the ground at is passes. This suggests to me (and I realize, of course, that I know nothing about it) that the Shelfari database wasn't very well-designed, and there were multiple places in which stars and books were being stored, which is Very Bad Database Design...

Does anybody know whether you can upload to GoodReads from the spreadsheets that Shelfari sends for your own records? Has anybody tried it?

I have been reading stuff that's taken me to places projects required me to visit, rather than on routes I'd ordinarily choose.

I found Martha's Vineyard and such places in the company of wealthy, Ivy league African-Americans an interesting view of a slice of life I'll never inhabit, but found The Emperor of Ocean Park too dull and vastly too long, not the thriller it was billed to be at all.

Work then required me to visit the spaceship of the Oankali people, with Octavia Butler's Dawn. Again, not a visit I would have made by choice and one that I couldn't really recommend. I don't know why the scholar whose book I'm supposed to be reviewing thought it worthy of study--up there with Flannery O'Connor short stories and Virginia Woolf's Orlando! Er, no. The emphasis was very much on displaying the complex alien society (the best part of the book) rather than on the human story, which was largely emotionless. It is the first (of course!) of a trilogy. I don't plan to read the others

Now I'm happily visiting NY with A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was engaging from page one--an oasis after the dry hills of books read out of duty.

So...hi y'all.

I requested a download of all of my Shelfari books, and separately, but the same day, requested that all my Shelfari books be moved to GoodReads.

On Jan 20, my downloaded files showed up, but I'm still waiting for my move to GoodReads. I've got 1176 books on my shelf, and I don't think they're really going to send them...

This is one more hassle in my life that I really, really don't need. Hard to stay even remotely positive. As for the compare books feature, that's a bit better than the Shelfari 'Books in Common' feature, but otherwise...I'm not impressed, but I reckon I'll get used to it.

And Lord only knows what's already on my Goodreads shelf; the first time I came to Goodreads, years ago, I had no idea what I was doing and it kept presenting me with books and saying "don't you want to read these?" and I kept saying "Why, yes, thank you, I would" so I guess they've ALL been added to my TBR, and I didn't mean for them to be. I was saying to those books "Pleased to meet you" and Goodreads was pimping them to me, saying "We will bring them to your tent." And I never figured out, on that first attempt, how to get out of that system-shoving-books-at-me mode!

As I said on FB: if there's one thing I surely do not need, it is recommendations from some algorithm designed by somebody I don't know.

If all my reading data as stored in Shelfari gets over here, I will be very pleased (and darned amazed).