Nope. How are they different?
Well, I was originally on Shelfari, but found Goodreads UI and other features to be way more useful for me.
I liked LibraryThing, but (I believe) they limit the number of books on free accounts.
I absolutely love Goodreads (and as some people know, it's the first place I applied when I was job hunting. It's still my dream job, but they employ like 20 people total). I use it for tracking my reading but I also use the listopia lists a lot when making book salon lists.
You can get an idea how it looks and works on my page: [link]
I loved LibraryThing, but I didn't want a paid account, either. And I think you could only catalog 200 books for free.
I haven't explored Goodreads enough (and I do avoid some of it, because apparently some author/reviewer nastiness has been going on, and I hate anything like that), but I'm also interested to see what Bookish will be like.
Amazon just recommended Midnight in Austenland to me.
Over on LibraryThing there's a group for Geeks who love Classics (or something), and Trollope was mentioned. I hopped over to Gutenberg, and yes, lots of Trollope, so I can dump oodles onto my Nook and catch up with a recommended author. But where do I start?
IE, What Trollopes do the Buffistas recommend? (I love saying his name, and I wonder if it's coincidence that loose women are also referred to as trollops.)
But where do I start?
JZ's a big fan and has read most of them. (There's a lot.) I'm sure she'd have some advice on the matter.
She loves how he writes women characters.
I started one of the famous ones a few years ago, and I got bored with the very typical English noblefolk. I keep expecting the women to get more assertive than they would in a book of that era, and I forget to change my behavior expectations for the characters. Possibly not a good idea to go straight from a fantasy with a kickass female warrior character to a book where the most aggressive a woman is likely to get is to argue about the man she's expected to marry. A lady in the Pump Room at Bath is not likely to pull a dagger out of her bodice and stab her rival--at least not in Trollope's novels. I'm sure there are some books where she would.
I love
Framley Parsonage;
in the midst of her pain and longing and confusion, the heroine is such a deliciously snarky little wiseass (Trollope consciously modeled her after
As You Like It's
Rosalind).
The Eustace Diamonds
is lively and fast-moving and has an enjoyably loathesome yet pitiable anti-heroine.
And
He Knew He Was Right
is harrowing and loaded with assumptions about the till-death-do-you-partness of marriage, but a great, great read about a weak, pasty young Othello who has a really pretty fantastic life and methodically destroys it, and his own sanity, essentially acting as his own Iago. Not by any means a fun read, but very gripping, and for anyone who's been caught in that ugly spiral of self-hate and paranoia egging each other on it's uncomfortably dead-on.
Othello as a one-man show?
Isn't The Eustace Diamonds the first of the Palliser novels? Loved the (really, really long) series.
The Eustace Diamonds is lively and fast-moving and has an enjoyably loathesome yet pitiable anti-heroine.
I just added this to my kindle. I love "buying" books for free.
