Book Review Tags

If you come to my blog instead of reading posts in an RSS reader, you may notice I've added an annoyingly long list of links to my sidebar, a list of "Book Reviews by Tags." I'm looking into getting it changed to its own separate page, like the "Book Reviews by Author" one, but so far I don't see a way to do that. As far as I can tell, Blogger will only allow gadgets to be added to all pages on a blog at once, not to specific ones. And without a gadget, I'd have to link to every single category and every single book by hand. That is not going to happen. Unh-uh. The mind boggles. Heh, I'm only about halfway through adding the tags to my book reviews as it is. I did "Book Reviews by Author" by hand, but there's just one author and one link per book -- so much easier!

Anyway, despite how much space it's taking up in my sidebar, I like it. I'm hoping it will be helpful, that it'll be a handy way to find some other books that might interest you. Plus I just like tagging books for its own sake, and I'd like to have some native tags instead of the LibraryThing ones. Sorry about the "br:" at the beginning of all of them. Since Blogger doesn't have sub-labels, it was the only way to keep them all together (for my own sanity as I check the boxes to get the two gadgets to display either the book review tags or the regular labels) and to distinguish them from the regular tags/labels (because I might tag a post about "Suffering," and that isn't the same as tagging a book I review about "Suffering").

My book reviews from here on out won't have that section at the top telling you how I'd tag them in LibraryThing, those tags will just be with the regular labels down at the bottom of the post. But I'm not going to go back through all my old reviews and remove the LibraryThing tag section. That'd be silly. And I'm never silly.

In related news, I see I haven't actually written and posted a new book review here in almost two years! Yikes! Sorry about that! I knew it'd been a long time, but I didn't realize it was that long! I think I'll start posting some new ones soon. Any day now. Honest.

I'd started thinking of book reviews as much harder than other kinds of posts. (Not the reading part. I almost always do that obsessively, with only the sorts of exceptions that prove the rule.) I'll try to scale back on my perfectionism in that area, take them less seriously, and see if that helps. They ain't gonna be perfect anyway! And it's not like I won't still compulsively edit. There's a little room for slack, I think. Better than not posting any in two years (cue disgusted face).

Of course, there have also been other things on my plate, things that provided plenty of their own material to post about, like this and this. I suppose there's a reason the very last review I posted was of Home. Naahhh. Couldn't be. Um.

So, what do you think? Do you want to see more book reviews? Like the tags? Dislike them? Ideas on how to move them? Don't care and you're really not even sure why you're here? Can't believe I would spend so much of my time going on and on about this? Completely unrelated suggestions? Talk to me. Bonus points for commenting here instead of on my facebook page, so I don't look so lonely. :)