Reading List

A few weeks ago, Harold and I exchanged tweets (why is there no convenient usage for this?) about reading selections, and how revealing a reading list can be. My choices right now are skewed towards travel (No surprise that I wish I were traveling again), Romans (I wish I were an ancient Roman), and most recently, Tudor historical novels (I guess I also wish I were eating smoked quail and manchet, or wearing a gable hood).

Then the other day, John from Sinosplice asked how I made my What I’m Playing widget over there on the side, and I had to admit it was a cut-and-paste from BigFishGames and Amazon. But it made me think about adding a booklist widget.

I’ve installed Now Reading Reloaded, a nice plugin that lets you add an ISBN, and it will fill out all the rest of the info, and get a nice cover picture from an Amazon search. I tinkered with the sidebar display for a while but now I’m really happy with it. And that was hardcore tinkering! With php! Be impressed! But I’m not really skilled, so I can’t figure out how to reverse the order of books displayed to show the most recent, instead of the oldest. Of course I can backdate whichever 5 books are my favorites, but that invalidates all the cool library functions. I added all the books I’ve read so far this year, which turned out to be 11.

It may sound like a lot, but I read almost every night before I go to sleep, and also, there’s a slight possibility that maybe I slack off at work a little.