Good Reads + Facebook


I discovered the ultimate social networking site for the literarily inclined: GoodReads. Forget poking, grouping, and writing on walls -- now you can send your friends all your favorite books with your reviews and get their comments and favorite books with reviews. A lifetime is too short to read all the stuff you can find this way! It's the ultimate virtual book club, except for the tea and cookies part.

The only thing missing on Good Reads is a women poets group, or a group for recommending poetry books (by women or not). The whole group thing on Good Reads seems fairly disorganized.

So I'll toss out an invitation: anyone reading here interested in forming a Good Reads group related to recommending good contemporary poetry books? A group on Good Reads, as on Facebook, includes a discussion board, so a lot of interactivity is possible but not necessary.

To that end, I've set up Good Reads' first poetry group: Poetry Current Best Reads. It may be clunky grammatically, but it gets the mission over in four words -- join and recommend poetry books you can't put down and think we should all read.

Facebook, by comparison, is far more advanced in forming groups, but it has a social networking dimension I simply don't have time for. In today's virtual globe, one must make choice and set priorities, as in the material world. One simply can't do or have it all, unless one wants to have to learn the lesson of King Midas -- how getting everything you want can be simply hell. And Facebook has become YouTube-vast. I have the feeling of being lost in a huge airport, with people rushing around grouping up, writing on walls, poking and playing games at a frenzied pace. Good Reads has a nice, narrow focus. Books. Just books.