Everyone has at least a couple of dreams that verge on the sinful or, totter on the edge of being ridiculous. One of mine that can neatly fit into the latter category is the one where I think about an uninterrupted stretch of 20 days where I can read a few books which languish and demand that they be read again.

A rather pragmatic aspiration, strangely enough, also revolves around books - or, that of a bookshelf. For some time now I've been obsessed with the idea of a bookshelf that would be best designed to hold the books and yet be aesthetically fitting into a home. And, the more posts land up on this blog, the more I start to put a serious thought to this entire thing. Books on interior designs are filled with pictures of bookshelves and what not. Sadly, most shelves are a perfect fit in that room they were photographed in. And, I am yet to meet someone who is capable of sitting down with me to understand what I require and what it takes to come up with a design and make that shelf. Headboards make for nice niches to store books, but they aren't a permanent solution to anything.

I wonder why is it so difficult to get down to designing a shelf that lights up a room without overpowering it and yet is functionally top-notch.

Finally I got around to creating a shelf on the Goodreads profile for books that I'd like to keep and read again. There ought to be a lot of books in Bengali that should get listed. It would be interesting to see how or, what books stack up for others.

If you cannot see that shelf then please leave a comment and I'll see what can be done.

Just a note to say that the app does seem to work. Both for scanning ISBNs and creating a ToRead as well as adding books to the Read shelf on Goodreads.com

Among the various things that get me fuming and fretting is the casual manner in which books are arranged in bookstores and libraries. You know what I'm talking about - those oh-so-innocent mistakes in categorization, the inability to check up inventory and, the general feeling of being ill-at-ease when using these services. Yes, that's the same feeling that returned with a vengeance when looking at BigBooks.

Cut to random anecdote.

During my student days when we were doing lab-work, we had a teacher whose daily drill was "a student is known by how clean he/she keeps her workspace". This, to me, was a small variation of the one my dad has - "the cleanliness habits of a family is known by how clean and organized the kitchen table is".

Cut to present day rant.

Why are the above to ditties relevant ? When you visit a bookstore, all you want to do is search for the books you want and hope that they will be under the appropriate categories. Once you've built up your stash you queue up in front of the cash counter, plonk down the cash and waltz out of the door (err... if you are at the Kolkata Book Fair, you'd either have to lug your sorry behind through a gate that is open just enough for anyone wearing skinny jeans to slip through or, you get pushed by the "maashimaas" into the wide open space in front of the stall). When you go to a library you figure out the way books are organized and then look them up. In both these cases the single most important aspect is the ability to look up what you want and, then obtain it. This is precisely where BigBooks fails completely miserably. Let me put it in some context - I used Flipkart when their search results were unpredictable and, the resultset displayed after the query was abominable. However, it didn't take them long to start fixing large parts of it (they got an important thing right though - they kept the site very sparse and simple in those initial days) . I didn't have to listen to "yeah we know that the search is a bit broken, why don't you send a list of books and we'd add it to your queue".

In my world of consuming online services that's fail. I hope that BigBooks revisits this part. If searching and building up a queue is difficult then using the service is difficult. A service that is difficult to use would have some uphill climb in customer acquisition even if it is backed up by a superb telephone-based networking and support.

I was planning to do a top ten books read (by category) and perhaps I'll eventually end up doing it. However, for the moment, here's my bookshelf with sorted by the Date Added (I generally add the books after I've read them, so, that should also indicated Date Read)