After swearing (with horrible punctuation, no less) that I was far too cool and/or busy actually reading my books to have any use for bookish social networks, I realized last weekend that the one thing missing from my blog—and thus, my life!—was a "currently reading" widget, and perhaps even a list of five or so recently read books.

I tried to maintain such a list by hand when I was using blosxom, but take a look at my posting frequency and guess how well I did at maintaining that! No, I need something easy to use and semi-automated after initial setup.

So, after promising myself that I will never waste an entire day cataloging all the books I own or have ever read, I figured there was no harm in starting such a list incrementally. By simply adding books whenever I start a new one, I'm paving the way to some day having a list of all the books I've read since June of 2007. Certainly not a life biography of reading (considering the dramatic decrease in book consumption since, oh, I graduated from high school), but pretty cool nonetheless.

So I joined shelfari and LibraryThing, but quickly came to the conclusion that, despite shelfari's much slicker interface, I'd have to go with the more toned-down LibraryThing widgets. Shelfari widgets are cool and all, but they don't really match the decidedly 2D kenspeckle aesthetic.

As soon as I'd carefully constructed my "currently reading" widget on Sunday evening, however, LibraryThing went down! And they've been down ever since!

Was the import of my my amazon wishlist just too much for their database? (Perhaps you should alleviate LibraryThing's burden by buying me something!) Did their main read slave (seemingly the cause of the problem) read my anti-bookish-social-networking comment and retaliate accordingly?

No one can say for sure. But whatever the cause of the outage, compulsive book indexers everywhere have been suffering the loss of LibraryThing, with nothing to do but photograph melancholy stacks of unindexed books or—!!!—read.