Blessed be new playthings.

Especially those to do with books. I’ve just discovered a brilliant new toy – LibraryThing, which is essentially the last.fm for books. I’ve plugged most of my books in there, so I get fun toys like author and tag clouds. I’d post one but they don’t seem to work in here. Never mind. The RSS feeds work, so you can (if you look down and to the right) keep tabs on exactly what I’m reading.

Now you might not think that’s that cool – you’re wrong, by the way, but never mind – but what certainly is cool is the ’swap this book’ function. It amalgamates data from a few book-swap sites (like BookMooch and ReadItSwapIt) so if you want to get shot of your copy, you can see if it’s in demand, or if you want one, you know where to go to request it. Brilliant! And I thought Amazon Marketplace was where it was at. I have been sorely mistaken.

Actually, the best thing about it is that it’s like having my own little library, which is one of my life’s ambitions. This is where it starts, people! You wait, in years to come I’ll have my library, and my wine cellar, and my garden triclinium. And you won’t be able to stop me!

For the uninitiated, the above is a garden triclinium, from the House of Sallust in Pompeii. Direct precursor of picnic tables. But infinitely better cos there’s like vines all over it. Exactly what I’m after.