For those who don't know, I now maintain pretty rigorous accounts at the nerdy-book-lover social networks LibraryThing and Shelfari; they are great places, in fact, to aggressively pursue new readers of the CCLaP blog and supporters of the center, basically by attempting to post as much free intelligent content there as possible. In fact, that's something I've found surprising about both services, to tell you the truth: that even though they're being used highly, with sometimes hundreds or even thousands of other people listing the same book as you, rarely is there any more than ten or so actual reviews written, and most of them barely a few sentences long, and a lot of the time no reviews at all. I figure as long as I'm compiling big lists of books there I recommend, I might as well take a "Roger Ebert compiling his giant-ass compendium" approach, and to write up thumbnail reviews of each book I list, which often times will end up being the only thing written about a book there at all, among the tens of thousands of people.

It helps not only to fill out the database over there, and to draw intrigued new readers, but to also promote CCLaP and direct people over here in a subtle way -- that is, I mention it in my profile and in the longer reviews, but that's about it. And meanwhile, I'll hopefully be slowly building a substantial body of small reviews there, sort of a free electronic version of my own compendium, that will simply be a service of CCLaP and something I do to support those two social networks, both of which I really like. Anyway, you can click here for LibraryThing and here for Shelfari; those links take you to my profile, which is also the official CCLaP profile there. Friendships ahoy!