Saturday, February 23, 2008

My Thailand library

As I was always an avid reader, I started to buy lots of books of Thailand when my interest into this country was started. I quickly finished with the standard books, like David K. Wyatt's Thailand - A short history, so now I often buy some strange topic books when browsing through the bookstores of Bangkok. Especially White Lotus Press has some very odd (but nevertheless interesting) titles in their catalog, like the reprints of historical books.

Librarything bannerTo give other Wikipedians the chance to use my library, and maybe even get to find a look into book I wasn't able to find, I started to list my most important books on Thai topics on a special page within Wikipedia. I now noticed the website librarything.com where one can do this with a much larger audience. It's limited to 200 books in the free version, which should be well enough to hold all my Thai books for the near future. But maybe I'll upgrade to the full account once they add collections to allow to categorize books beyond the simple tags. Anyway, you can see all those books I added there, or even subscribe to RSS feed to get updates whenever I add a new one. I think I have added all notable already. Of course I will write a review here when I find something new (or antiquarian) fitting to the topic of this blog, not just on this library thing.

Quite a lot of my books there are none of the other member's library, so librarything is not yet the place for me to find interesting new/old books for Thai topics. A really huge bibliography of Thai topics is the Leeds Thai politics bibliography, compile by Dr. Michael Nelson.

6 comments:

bact' said...

oh, wow. what a collection.

also from your link to thai politics @ leeds,
i give me a clearer answer why lots of thai students go there to study political sciences !

bact' said...

and Duncan McCargo is one of the "hottest" foreign authors among thai intellects recently :P

Andy said...

I will probably add more books in a month when I am in Bangkok again, and as you recommend Duncan McCargo I'll definitely take a look into his books as well, or even buy them.

mail said...

Thanks for suggesting Librarything to us. I found it's quite very useful. However, I just can't add it into my blogspot just like what you have on the side bar. Don't know why? Some say that now blogspot just block it. If you don't mind, kindly share with me how you added the Librarything on your blogspot template. -- Thanks Jakkrit

Andy said...

I just tried to add the librarything widget to my travel blog and it worked right out of the box. In the layout dialog, simply add a "HTML/Javascript" widget and fill the HTML from librarything.

mail said...

Ok thank you very much. i"ll try again.