Most folks have a couple of John Grisham novels on the the shelf but what would it be like to chat for a couple of hours with someone who has read all or most of the same books that you have? The Library Thing lets you browse the libraries of others that share your taste in books. It’s cooler than I can describe.

More than 6,000 users have signed up since August 29, 2005. And some of them have catalogued thousands of books. Mary Elizabeth Burstein –an associate professor of English at the State University of New York– has 3,424 titles in her library.

I’m not even at the half-way mark of my 500 titles but I’m getting there. Once I’m caught up, it’ll be time to give a holler to some of the folks that share my taste in fiction.

Regular readers know I love lists. A couple of years ago I made a list of my books at the time, but it’s a paint in the ass to do without a database. Now, a clever guy named Tim Spalding (a web developer, web publisher and search-engine optimizer based in Portland, Maine) has solved this problem and the world is a better place for it.

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid lifetime account allows you to catalog any number of books. I’m just getting started and it’s going to take me a bit to enter all of my titles but once it’s done I’ll have something so much more useful. Thank you, Tim.