Reading has always been one of my hobbies. During the years I have always read, sometimes a lot, sometimes not as much. When I finished high school I started buying all the books I read, as opposed to borrowing them from the library or friends. I feel this gives me the opportunity to read on my own time and pace.
I never really read book reviews, because most books reviewed weren’t really the type I like, or because the reviewers hates books for reasons I find exceptable. Also, I like to form my own opinion and not be led by a review.
So, when I joined the LibraryThing website in 2006 it was merely to catalog my collection, and not for the ‘social’ aspect of the website. I didn’t participate in the forums on the website, nor did I look at the automatically generated recommendations before I had fully cataloged my collection, because I somehow felt I was ‘cheating’.

Back in April I finished my LibraryThing catalog. I had also started tracking my buys and reads on the site. There are several fields on the book details page for this, but more importantly, there are several forum topics for this. There are topics where members posts whatever books they are reading, or have finished, and also which books they have bought. Also, since the arrival of collections on the website (collections are basically a set of books you can include or exclude from your library, enabling the creation of wishlists), there are charts of the books that are most being read, and are wished for the most. This gives a good overview of what’s popular at the moment.

Because LibaryThing is a social network, you can attach value to what certain users say or recommend. If a user has many books in common with you, you can attach a higher value to his opinion and vice versa. All the comments and recommendation really led me to many new books, some of which I might never have picked up if not for the recommendations in LibraryThing.

Some of these books are The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt. Some other books I stumbled upon through the internet are The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Cambell and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr..

I guess what I am trying to say is that I am pleasantly surprised by the good suggested reading that I am finding on the internet these days, yay for the internet (the people on the internet)!