You can’t buy it all...
For years, I must admit, I tended to steer clear of public libraries, and I'm still not entirely convinced.
For one reason or another, however, I ended up with a borrower's card for the old Bowen Shire library, and when Bowen Shire was absorbed into the Whitsunday Regional Council I duly swapped the old card for a new one without doing much in the way of borrowing.
After all, as far as Hughesy's concerned, if a book is worth reading there's every chance you'll want to reread it at some point in the future, and when you're looking for something to read it's handy to have it on your shelves rather than stowed away in some remote location.
As indicated elsewhere shelf space in the Little House of Concrete is in limited supply, and there's no way I can keep what I've got, add what I'm interested in and store it all on site.
Along the way something's going to have to give.
An extra complication kicked in once my brother and I inherited our late father's unit at Southport. Madam and I visit the place at least four times a year, generally preferring to fly rather than drive, and baggage limits mean that it isn't possible to carry a lot of stuff with you or bring a swag of stuff back.
A visit to the Southport branch of the Gold Coast City Council Library, however, revealed a cornucopia of literary and audio-visual material, so it's more or less inevitable that our arrival in Southport will be followed more or less immediately by a trip to the library.
Hughesy's memory not being what it once was, I need some way of keeping track of what I've actually read, along with a list of titles to watch out for.
Which is where this section of the site kicks in.
As we move into an increasingly digital data oriented world it makes sense to use things like this website and my Bento database to keep track of what I've read and what I haven't. I've even been able to use the iPod as a notebook to keep track of what I'm looking for, so what follows is another step in the consolidation of Hughesy's digital data.