MembroJoeB1934

Nome Real

Joe Bozovich

Acerca da Minha Biblioteca

A Synopsis of my Reading Journey Analysis

I am writing a report on the various stages involved in conducting my reading journey. These stages will be shortened considerably to provide a summary of the process and the results.

Stage 1: Determine My Reading Objectives

An analysis of my heritage, my youth experiences, where I grew up, and my professional work experiences allowed me the foundation needed to explore likely reasons why I picked the books I read.

The list of factors I selected were as follows:

1) My Scottish and Slovenian ancestors and their lives before they came to the United States.
2) Early 20th century and the life of immigrants after they arrived here.
3) How the earliest migrations into North America, called Paleo Indians came to be and how society continues to deal with the lives of current Native Americans.
4) Anything related to Wyoming.
5) All aspects of development of mankind over millions of years and how current scientific research reveals phenomenal insight into how mankind populated the world.
6) The use of strategy and intelligence in national defense.

Stage 2: Establish an analytical framework to use in the analysis

I was a newcomer to LibraryThing, so I needed to experiment with the various features of the site that I could use. As a software developer myself, I am incredibly impressed with this powerful platform, and couldn’t have performed this analysis without it.

In the early stages, I was quite hopeful of using the various cloud displays, but I didn’t use them. Instead, the Tagmash feature was the key to my whole analysis.

By experimenting with various tagmash statements that were framed to represent the 6 factors in my reading objectives I developed a list of 17 specific tagmash statements that appeared to capture the majority (80%) of my library books.

I have never fully valued the classical genres used in describing a book. I think of books at a sub-level within those classical labels.

I consider my 17 tagmash statements as Tag Genres which I will use to classify the books in my library. Names for those tag genres are as follows:

Genre Names: British Mystery, Non-British Mystery, Literary Mystery, Scottish Literature, Books about Books, Coming of Age, Wyoming
Espionage, Paleo Indians, Native Americans, Science & Nature, Science Fiction, Horror, Psychological Mystery, Award Authors, Historical Fiction, and Fantasy.

Stage 2: Determine for each book which Tag Genre the book belongs to.

The data we need to process consists of the following:

1) A title and author for each book in the library, which has 1250 books.
2) LibrarytThing provides a list of, up to 500 book titles and authors that belong to each Tag Genre statement.
The computational task is to inspect each of 17 genre book lists in order to determine if a specific book is contained in any of the genre book lists.

It is very important to recognize that any individual book can belong to multiple genres. This fact becomes fundamental to this analysis.

This computational task was solved by creating two Excel workbooks. One workbook, called the TAGMASH BOOK contains 17 tag genre spreadsheets provided by LibraryThing.

The second workbook, called the TAGMASH PLATFORM contains one spreadsheet where the rows contain the title and author of each book in the library.

The sheet has one column for each tag genre. In the cell for the intersection of a specific book and a specific tag genre there is embedded a match command that scans the Tagmash Book spreadsheet to determine if the book title is contained in that tag. If a match is found a text is embedded in the return to the cell.

This synopsis hasn’t sufficient display space to show a picture of an Excel spreadsheet, but I can display a table of the results from the process just described.

TOTALS LIBRARY
Books Read 1239

Genre Name
British Mystery 266
Non-British Mystery 257
Literary Mystery 122
Scottish Literature 31
Books about Books 36
Coming of Age 30
Wyoming 20
Espionage 40
Paleo Indians 14
Native Americans 12
Science & Nature 20
Science Fiction 40
Horror 39
Psychological Mystery 72
Award Authors 528
Historical Fiction 184
Fantasy 38

 
Across the library I found that books that I have the strongest emotional attachment to are the books that belong to more genres than others ranked lower.

During the conduct of the analysis, I determined that, generally speaking the fiction books fit into many of the tag genres listed and the non-fiction books were clustered around a few of the more science & nature categories. This led me to partition the library into two groups. The largest group I call Mystery+ for fiction books usually related to those genres of a mystery type. The second partition is called Heritage+ and all of the non-fiction books are in that category plus fiction books related to science and nature. This is mostly fiction books allied to Native American tag genre.

All books in the library have been connected to the tag Genre list and Collections were created for the two partitions. Each partition has a CORE set of books which are the unique set of books which represent that partition. In addition, each partition has a so-called fingerprint set of books which collectively capture the essence of the core books in a small number of books.

NOTE: This description is under revision to provide the most updates to the analysis.

Acerca de Mim

I have always been known as a ‘mystery’ reader, but at my current age (87) I find that term to be rather uninformative about my actual reading interests.

A few years ago, I discovered that there exists a category of books called ‘literary mystery’. It turned out, after the fact, that I had read 30 of the top 50 such books, as described by a Goodreads list.

The key is that MYSTERY is defined as a genre of literature whose stories focus on a puzzling crime, situation, or circumstance that needs to be solved.

I would modify that definition by substituting the words ‘solved, understood or analyzed’ for the word ‘solved’

The definitive aspect of my nature is that I have always been an analyst, over and above other traits.

This aspect led me to a long professional career in developing commercially viable software for help to:
1) Professional service firms managing their projects.
2) US federal government agencies in evaluation of a myriad of national security issues.

This nature of mine led me in 2021 to ask myself “what books have I read and why did I prefer some a lot more than others?”

This launched me on what I call MY READING JOURNEY. The results I discovered in that journey are described in the About my library section.

BEFORE READING THAT Consider the following:

While reading ‘Lanark’ by Alasdair Grey I read the introduction to the book which was written by William Boyd. These authors are outstanding Scottish literary luminaries.
William Boyd led the Introduction by the following statement:

“Readers develop unique histories with the books they read. It may not be immediately apparent at the time of reading, but the person you were when you read the book, the place you were where you read the book, your state of mind while you read it, your personal situation (happy, frustrated, depressed, bored) and so on- all these factors, and others, make the simple experience of reading a book a far more complex and multi-layered affair than might be thought. Moreover, the reading of a memorable book somehow insinuates itself into the tangled skein of personal history that is the reader's biography: the book leaves a mark on that page of your life - leaves a trace
- one way or another.”

Localização

Denver,CO

Autores Favoritos

Rennie Airth, Kate Atkinson, Robert Barnard, Belinda Bauer, M. C. Beaton, Benjamin Black, Cara Black, Sara Blædel, S. J. Bolton, Stephen Booth, C. J. Box, Christopher Brookmyre, Ken Bruen, Peter Carey, John le Carré, Agatha Christie, Ann Cleeves, Harlan Coben, Thomas H. Cook, Deborah Crombie, Paul Doiron, Allen Eskens, Charles Finch, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Robert Galbraith, Elizabeth George, Robert Goddard, Martha Grimes, Jane Harper, Reginald Hill, Susan Hill, Anne Holt, Alan Hunter, Arnaldur Indridason, P. D. James, Peter James, Lisa Jewell, Craig Johnson, Camilla Läckberg, Donna Leon, Peter Lovesey, Henning Mankell, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Kate Morton, Jo Nesbø, Louise Penny, Anne Perry, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell, Peter Robinson, Dorothy L. Sayers, Diane Setterfield, Donna Tartt, Charles Todd, C. J. Tudor, Martin Walker, Ruth Ware, Beatriz Williams, Jacqueline Winspear, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Listas Favoritas

Club Read's Recommended Nonfiction Written by Women

Ligações de Membro

Amigos

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Biblioteca Interessante

almin, Ameise1, Andrew-theQM, anzlitlovers, Aquila, arubabookwoman, beaniebear, benitastrnad, Berly, BLBera, bnielsen, bookwrapt, Chatterbox, citygirl, daliagagne, dchaikin, DeltaQueen50, dianeham, ELiz_M, janoorani24, JFB87, Jim53, June, katiekrug, labfs39, librarian1204, lizzy50usa, lsh63, LWyandt, Maddz, mathgirl40, nawatramani, nytbestsellers, porte01, powderriver, rv1988, sangreal, Sergeirocks, sesgreen25, SevenThumbsUp, skullduggery, thorold, timspalding, trevor.boyson, VivienneR

Contactos

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