Books By Year

 After getting music back to 1500, I decided to try a "books by year". It will be fun to combine the two. I could read a book from some year while listening to music from that same year. 

The first step is getting the baseline. I've recently published my thoughts on books with the year tagged. Blogger is not quite as accessible as iTunes. However, I was able to create a script to extract all the 4 digit years, and then use some unix tools to find the missing years. My first run seemed to have issues, but after the second run, it seemed to work. (It does miss out on years like 150 AD, but it will be a while before I get back there!)

Then it was off to Goodreads and Wikipedia to find books for the missing years. The top books of a year on Goodreads was a nice place to start. However, it seems to have books that were popular in that year, not necessarily published then.  Wikipedia was more accurate in publication, but it was also an unordered list of books.

Many of the missing years seemed to be devoid of books that I'd readily recognize. However, some had books that I recognized as having read recently. As I looked through the blog, I discovered it was there, but before I started to add publication date. From there, I started a project of adding a date to all the older posts that were missing ones. This produced a slightly more complete list. There were still some that I do remember reading, but don't have recorded. I found some non-blog essays that I brought in. Then I did hunt for sources. 

The sources were of limited value. I grabbed an old iTunes library, and found the last played date for audiobooks. However, if I didn't write about it, I wasn't totally sure I actually listened. (I know I once accidentally left the whole library playing over the weekend.) Last.fm scrobbles would have a similar problem. Amazon.com interviews were another source, but most of the old ones seem to have vanished. Similarly, the links to the sources in the blog seem to be mostly broken. Amazon disabled picture links and those are totally gone. Most other links over a decade old are also non-working.

As for finding new books, I have mostly picked interesting ones and looked them up in Libby to see if they have an audiobook. Beyond that, I check for books. There are often free Kindle versions of old public domain books (mostly from project Gutenberg.) I have a preference for ones that are not too long.  I know have books on hold or read to fill in every year back to 1900. Let's see how far back I can go. Reading a book, even a short one tooks a bit more time than listening to a song.