Thoughts On: What I Read When I'm Not Reading

I love to read (Can that be more of an obvious, unnecessary understatement? No matter.)! I find few things more enjoyable than cracking into a good book. But I increasingly find that over the years I've become just as addicted to reading about reading. The popularity of sites like Goodreads, LibraryThing,  and MobileRead--not to mention the cornucopia of book blogs--have made it that much easier to spend large amounts of time reading about possible book selections or musing about the craft of reading/writing itself. Have you ever spent a solid block of hours surfing about the topic of books, reading or writing? Well, then, I've got a few more sites to add to your list, all of which I've discovered within the last few months and have enjoyed for the reading-related enjoyment they bring.

Book Yap (site)
Like discovering new literary finds? On this site, rather than relying on recommendations from friends, you're searching for books based on the aggregate data put forth by countless other readers. The site itself is relatively new and, as such, still has a somewhat limited database of titles compared to some of the more established setups. But even so, the search functions are easy to use and helpful, the interface is purty, and the vibe of the whole thing is magnetic, anyhow. And I've received some good recs from it thus far!

Bite-Size Edits (site)
Love to nick-pick the heck out of written works? This site is based on allowing you to do just that, whilst being of assistance to others. The premise is that writers of all types upload their prose to the site, which then breaks the works down to a few isolated sentences at a time. Other folks can then suggest edits for these bite-sized bits of writing. As the site creators note, this dynamic of community-style editing is not meant to replace the more traditional editing process (which, among other things, takes into account a written work as a whole), but rather help with the indisputable or straightforward issues of grammar and style.

LibriVox (site)
Fond of your own voice? Like to read stories to others? Is there a particular type of timbre you want to have read War and Peace to you? LibriVox is a project similar in spirit to Project Gutenberg (in which out-of-copyright works are made electronically available to the public, free of cost). In this case, however, it's audio books that populate the site. People can upload recordings of themselves reading public domain works, and anyone can download and enjoy them. This is obviously a great resource if you enjoy both classics and audio books.

So that's that. Hopefully, you'll find some of the offerings on this site as enjoyable and addictive as I have. Because we can't spend all our time in books. ^_^