Better read than other alternatives

One of the strange things that always happens when I move is that I become incredibly focused on cataloguing and organization. Some of this is sensible. I want my kitchen to be a certain way in order to optimize the experience. Have the pots and pans here, the dishes there, that sort of thing. Other times it makes a little less sense such as earlier tonight when I took everything out of one perfectly good box and placed all of the papers into a perfectly good bin. I did this because I preferred having bins over boxes. The fact that I just repacked notebooks from a job that I left and that I have no intention to ever look at again somehow doesn’t factor into the equation whatsoever.

But that is completely sensible compared to the following.

Now I often mention my spreadsheet containing all of the CDs that I own. It is the driver behind the random CD project and while it is uber geeky there is at least some sense behind it. I first put it together when I went to grad school and not all of my CDs traveled with me. Basically it was a quick reference guide as to what CDs were in which state as I bounced around the country. I kept it up because it was simple to do. Bought a new disc, add it to the spreadsheet.

Well, for the past two nights I have been doing a similar thing with my book collection. I had tried this a few years back but gave up after screaming at the madness of trying to catalog every single book I own. It’s not like I am going to randomly choose books to reread. There is some peace of mind knowing that I have a list of everything that I own but even that isn’t the main reason for this task. See, I am doing this entirely to impress people on Facebook.

I have the Visual Bookshelf app and am now in the process of trying to make it match up with my actual bookshelf. Now when I first joined Facebook I entered almost 300 books that I had read. How does one identify 300 books that they have read? Very simply if you are me and have kept a list of every book that you have read since 1998. Now I’m adding in the books that I own that I read pre-1998.

So that is the how but the bigger question is the why. Part of it is being a completist. If I have a list of books I read I want it to contain every possible data point. But mainly it is because I am an arrogant prick. See, if you click on the profile link it shows where you rank compared to everyone else on Facebook in terms of number of books read. So I have this unbelievable desire to be ranked as highly as possible and to show to the world just how incredibly well read I am. I want people to see me and go “Wow, that guy has read a lot of books.”

Except of course no one would ever actually do that. Who cares if I rank 2,000 on a Facebook app? Am I really impressing anyone when they check to see what I have read and find a surprisingly large number of books discussing pro wrestling? Maybe it is just this little ego boost for myself. It is a way to help convince myself that I actually am smart even if reading a lot of books does not necessarily equate into intelligence. Or maybe I just find it cool. Sometimes that is enough.