Supernatural Fiction Readers discussion

I often print out book lists, miscellaneous facts, histories & comments about books & authors & stick them into the appropriate place on the book shelf. Usually this is done for re-reads or on series - it's hard to keep all of them straight.

Some authors & books lend themselves to this better than others. For instance, I just read "A Night In Lonesome October" by Roger Zelazny & am discussing it in another group. While I knew many of the characters were drawn from history & historical fiction, I hadn't been able to figure them all out & found out more that I'd missed in the course of the discussions. I compiled some of these, including a couple of Wikipedia articles on the characters. I'll print all this out & stick it in the book so when I read it again in 5 years or so, I'll have the reference material ready.

I have a pretty good collection of books, a couple of thousand or more. Many I've had for over 30 years & have read several times. I collect large series & specific authors, so a list is often mandatory for me - my memory isn't that good.

Do you do something similar? Do you have favorite sites you use to look up books & authors?

I don't really write lists of books for myself (except for one of books recommended to me by my Goodreads friends). But my wife, who's an avid reader of Westerns, has a written, alphabetized list of every book by Louis L'Amour that she owns; she keeps it in her purse so that, if she sees a book by him on sale, she can check to see if she has it already. (Usually she does. :-) ) She'd like to have a similar list for books by J. T. Edson as well.

Also, I know another Goodreader who for years has kept a written log of every book he's read. I wish I'd done that --I could add a lot of titles that I've forgotten to my read shelf, especially books I read as a kid, and now have no clue as to the title!

Besides Goodreads, the only site I use to look up books is Amazon, or the Gale Literature Resource Center, a database to which the library where I work subscribes. Also, I've browsed quite a bit in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers and different editions of the Anatomy of Wonder, which is an annotated bibliography of recommended science fiction. Also, my library subscribes to Booklist and Library Journal, and of course doesn't keep back issues forever. For the last several years, I've torn out the fiction book review pages from the discarded issues and taken them home, where I store them in the filing cabinet. Every so often, I go through them and mark titles that look interesting, then cut out those reviews and store them, by genre and alphabetically by author, in a couple of photo albums (the kind with flat pages and a page -sized transparent cover over each one, which works perfectly). I guess that's sort of a list! I'll probably never read most of them (unless I live to Methuselah's age), but it's okay to dream.

A great site for looking up authors & books is Fantastic Fiction They have a great list of authors & books, 15,000 & over 250,000, respectively. It's a UK site, but they have US links to Amazon & other sellers including Ebay listings.

You can see listings of all the books, series in published order, a quick bio of the author & even the book cover art. There are also links to related sites where you can get more information. This is really handy in cases where the publishing order of a series is out of chronological order within it, like Modessit's Recluse series or Brust's Vlad Taltos series.

Agreed, Jim. Fantastic Fiction is a fabulous site!

I also like Fantastic Fiction. Though I've come across an error or two at times, it's still a great site.

This is definitely miscellany, but very funny & fairly educational. Anyone else here read Cracked.com? It's irreverent, has tons of foul language, quite a few boob shots, & some wonderfully informative lists. This one is "How to become an author in 5 incredibly hard steps".

http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-to-be...

One part reads, "Learning to edit is, quite simply, learning to hate yourself word by word. If you have a healthy sense of self-esteem right now, you should seriously consider a better career path than "professional writer". Might I suggest prostitute,..."

Jim, that article was hilarious. Thank god I don't want to be a writer. It sounds like a brutal process.

Anyway, about the lists. I'm a serial list maker and, like Werner's wife, I have a list or two tucked away in my purse for my periodic forays to the UBS or garage sales. A few years ago I came across a forum with people's favorite fantasy books on it. Most were older and not in my library so I keep that list in my purse and have been slowing checking out those books. Its kind of fun. Best finds off that list were Martha Wells, Doranna Durgin and Steven Gould.

Glad you liked it, Laura. I'm kind of a Cracked.com junky.

Not supernatural, but with all the authors in this group, I thought it might be of interest. I just finished reading Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour. One of the main themes of the book is how much he had to read & research in order to write. My review is here:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

At the same time, Janny Wurts, a well know fantasy author, wrote something similar in a short blog post here:
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...

Other than writing fiction, the two couldn't be more different in their styles. L'Amour's stories are short & straight forward. Janny's stories are generally epics that twist tropes & burn their images into my mind, yet both feel the same way about research.