Under Trump, there’s a danger of that, but I’m pretty certain it’s got international holdings.
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lot’s of 5, including some unexpected priorities:
i.e
- Romance languages and literatures
The Library collects materials in all Romance languages and literature at Level 4, except as noted in section III.3. and for the following:
a. Dalmatian languages and literatures - Level 2
b. Romansch languages and literatures - Level 3
c. Catalan languages and literatures - Level 3
d. Galician languages and literatures - Level 3
e. Cuban literature since the 1959 revolution - Level 5
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Same here. I’ve never used it as a social media site, I only use it to read a synopses of future reads.
I never knew they had non-fiction books, but sure enough my book is there with 4 (mostly positive) reviews.
As communities on the web go, they’re hardly in the top half of awfulness.
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I feel like I must not be reading enough. I just remember which books I’ve read.
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I’m not an avid reader, 20 books a year or so, but still I often can remember the events of a book but not the name, or the author. I think of a book I read and remember it fondly, and decide to go back and see if that author wrote anything else like it, etc. Other times people will refer to a book and the title will seem familiar, and I will go check and find that I read it, but had forgotten all about it.
I wish my memory was good enough to recall all the titles and authors going back years, but alas.
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Dammit Tolstoy! Ruining it for the rest of us. Grrr.
I grew up in a household where both parents were not native English speakers (from China and Germany), but we kids were all made to learn American English to fit in (insofar as that was possible) in the utterly strange American Midwest. Multiple languages were always around our house from Day 1, and it was/is the way to speak to overseas family members.
I slogged through two years of Classical Latin (again, in the American Midwest) (did I mention that’s a strange territory?) and have forgotten a lot of it. I do retain an appreciation for how easy some languages are to learn, when they lack declined nouns and the verbs don’t have lots of weird cases.
I took Latin to understand English better.
Also, taking 6 credit hours of “foreign language” instruction was a degree requirement.
Our prof was nice enough to have us reading Ovid and we weren’t forced to read commentaries on the Gallic War blah blah blah or as we say in Latin etc.
Rats! This is terrible news!
[insert facepalm gif]
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Gallic War, Ars Armatoria/Metamorphoses, and the Aeneid for me.
The line “We’ll take the foreplay as read” reminded me of many an elision.
Russian is, iirc, an inflected language.
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This is exactly why I’m here. This site is still active, still moderated, not owned by some megacorp, and no longer as popular as it once was. So it feels like good ole fashion internet.
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Huh. Why log in to Goodreads? You can dismiss the giant box that prompts you to log in.
I’m not into everything being “social.” I use it for research (about fiction), specifically:
(1) Finding other books by an author I’ve just discovered (and the sequence of books in a series from long ago). This information is now fairly available elsewhere, but it didn’t used to be.
(2) Seeing reviews from bloggers who link to their reviews blog. If I like or agree with their review on Goodreads, I often find their blog good too.
I also don’t see any ads, presumably because I use Privacy Badger. GR doesn’t block me because I’m supposedly using an “ad blocker.”
I have been monkeying around with self-learning it for about eight months now, and it’s mostly miserable. I could pointy talky and buy a beer or find a bathroom, but the odds of me ever being fluent are basically nil.
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And presumably you know enough to realise that pseudo-Cyrillic is horribly horribly wrong?
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Yes! I have to start and stop so many movies now just to see the nonsense flashing past on uniforms and signs and such. It is awesome, though, when you find it done well.
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If I asked you to list all the books you’d read in the first half of 2018 would you be able to?
Obviously I remember what I have read as well but it’s still a different thing to have a list.
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I work in a bookstore for a living and have never once visited Goodreads. I’m not sure I understand why it exists. If you want to talk about books with friends, there’s email, text messages and countless other ways. If you want to keep track of the books you’ve read for some reason, why not write a list? If you’re looking for book recommendations, ask your friends, listen to podcasts about books that you enjoy, visit your local library (or, as I’ve been doing during the pandemic, use a library app, which actually IS a useful and enjoyable piece of book-related technology) or any of a hundred other options that are better than sifting through toxic sludge on a social media site. Why the fuck do people subject themselves to this in the first place?
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I’m not telling you to like or use Goodreads. I just don’t quite understand a visceral hate for any social media platform. It’s all in the way you use it. It’s the same when people say I should quit Facebook. I never encounter any crazy people on Facebook because my friends aren’t generally crazy and on the other hand much if the networking in my discipline goes on there.
I can understand why Facebook is bad for society on a structural level but not why it is supposed to be for me specifically. It’s the same for Goodreads I suppose.
That said I did quit Reddit years ago because it was becoming too toxic all around.
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If you want to keep track of the books you’ve read for some reason, why not write a list ?
You mean on paper? Like in the Beforetimes? And what are these “Friends” and “Libraries” you speak of, that seem to be somewhere not online? Your ancient ways are scary and confusing.
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Honestly, I’d probably type mine up if I were inclined to make one, but I don’t see why anyone would prefer a system where you MUST be online and dependent on a particular site and its rules and format for something as simple as making and/or sharing a list.
Aside from your continued patronage helping support a system that’s bad for society… well, this is based on my years-old experience using Facebook, but a few things I remember are horrible privacy settings that let people tag me in photos without permission, frequent data breaches that expose personal information to scammers, marketing companies and other bad actors, a frustrating user interface that, rather than putting things in easy-to-follow chronological order, arranges them by arcane algorithms for unknown, manipulative purposes, friend requests from bots, inconsistent and unfair censorship practices, and constant attempts to “suggest” crap I had no interest in, much of which was likely misinformation. All of these issues were either annoying, harmful or potentially harmful to me as a personal Facebook user, and I can’t think of a single positive thing Facebook gave me that couldn’t be achieved through text messaging instead.
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I didn’t expect myself to be cast as the defender of Facebook all of a sudden but funnily enough all of these problems you mentioned have been addressed over the years (except the censorship practices I suppose).
I suspect that we have very different experiences because my life and my friend group are spread over several different countries. I would feel quite isolated if I only used text messaging to stay in contact. I suppose it’s the difference of being an active and a passive part of your friends’ lives. I can talk to them, be an active part of their lives, with text messages, video calls and in the before times we would often visit each other; but there’s another aspect of keeping in contact. If we all lived in the same area I would hear about what people were doing from other friends, I would randomly meet people on the street and have a 2min conversation that updates me on their lives, etc. This casual way of staying a part of the community isn’t possible when you are far away but Facebook (and Instagram) make it possible to at least have a simulacrum of that.
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