Assignment #10

I decided to use the tool Library Thing to determine a list of 10 books that I would like to read. I had been meaning to take a closer look at this site all semester, and now seemed to be the perfect time to do it.

My first challenge was to successfully navigate the site. In turn, I explored all of my profile areas (empty, as I had not yet done anything with it), and then moved on to the public spaces. I started with the “talk” section, but this quickly became too overwhelming. The discussion topics used acronyms that I was not familiar with and had responses to challenges I had not heard. Many discussion topics had hundreds of replies. Even when I saw a topic that sounded interesting (such as Fantasy Book Club suggestions), the thought of wading through the sheer number of replies discouraged me.

The next place that I explored, “groups”, was far more helpful. At the top of the page was a tag cloud, showing some of the most popular tags. These were self explanatory, such as “religion” and “science fiction”. This gave me a much clearer way to navigate the wealth of information on this site. It also featured the trending discussions of this week and groups devoted to specific interests (science fiction fans, writer readers). It seemed that perhaps the best way to compile a list of books that I would be interested in reading was to explore some of the groups that seemed aligned with my interests.

On a whim, I saw that there was a group entitled “Tea!” with the description of “tea drinkers everywhere, unite!”. A little bemused, I clicked on this group. Being a tea drinker myself, I was interested to see what kind of book recommendations I could get from a group devoted to the drinking of tea on Library Thing. I clicked on the discussion topic “which tea book are you currently reading?” and was astounded to find the many, many different kinds of books on and including the subject of tea.

As I began to comb through the archives of this message topic, I began to think about the kind of books regarding tea that I might like to read. I was not terribly interested in recipe books. While I'm certain that at some point I might want to casually pick up a recipe book to try some new teas, I do not have a burning thirst (pardon the pun) to read such a book cover to cover. It seemed to me that a book about the history of this beverage, or perhaps a novel in which tea plays a significant role, would be of interest to me.

My criteria for selection was to gather a list of 20 or so books whose titles interested me, to click on those hyper-linked titles in the discussion board to read the reviews page, and then to pare it down to a list of 10 books that I am very interesting in reading. I realize that had I uploaded books to my “library”, this process would have been very different, as the site would let me know if it thought if I would like the book or not. Still, despite doing it the “hard” way, I think that I found a very worthwhile reading list. My final selections are as follows:


A Social History of Tea by Jane Pettigrew

Steeped in the World of Tea by Sharon Bard

The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery

Cup of Tea by Geraldene Holt

Strong Tea by John B. Keene

Tea: The Drink that Changed the World by Laura C. Martin

Death by Darjeeling by Laura Childs

Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, Empire by Roy Moxham

A History of the World in 6 glasses by Tom Standage

Seeds of Change: Six Plants that Transformed Mankind by Henry Hobhouse


7 of these books are histories (specifically, social histories) and three are novels. These books seemed to be to me the most interested, most comprehensive, and highest reviewed of the “tea” books. I also spent some time exploring the entire “tea” tag, and my results were about the same. The recommendations of others on the message board seemed to match my own evaluations of the top books from the entire “tea” list.

In the end, I emerged from this with a list of 10 interesting books on a topic that I never would have thought to explore on my own. I also emerged with a time sucking website addiction to rival facebook, as one tag leads to another and a librarian-in-training can all too easily be lost in all the books.