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If you're going to do the tiled thing make the most important tile, the current book being read, centered and largest. It should be the central focus. Centered vertically as well, or nearest the top below the top menu line. Make Search a persistent tile/button if it's going to just open another screen. If you're doing the tile bit, make the other menu type choices(Library, Bookstore, Reading Life) buttons or tiles as well. Left justified text menu items as they are now look sloppy, they could at least have been centered.
When you long press on a tile, allow the user to select Tile Type and Persistence as well as Dismiss it. Why is there an Open option when clicking it does that? Size might be a nice option if it can be offered for each location/tile type.
If you're doing a visual representation make use of the available elements like size, position, shading to indicate prominence in the interface. The current reading title should be front and center on the page with everything else subordinate to it, as it will be most used. Even the old style card deck or carousel employed that usage as it made sense visually.
I'd consider making the current book visually centered, depicting smaller half occluded covers next to it for last read, and allow scrolling that list of say 5 items by swiping. Below it I'd consider doing a line of tiles doing the same for most recently added items, perhaps with an option to switch precedence and make either row of covers the larger depending on which was being scrolled through.
Optionally, allow for a one button press, or gesture that takes the most prominent row of tiles and turns the display landscape with just them for the largest display for the wider carousel or card deck format to quickly scroll through the last five or ten items. This would be great to enlarge covers that don't display well smaller.
As for all the other requirements, fix the bugs and figure out what is taking so long to build what should be a very simple database with less than 10 fields, and probably a few hundred to a thousand characters necessary per book. Why is the current database averaging 40K per book as reported by some? No wonder it is godawful slow to paw through. If need be, strap on the big boy pants and dump the Sqlite crap and roll your own. This is a mobile device, it should be lean and mean, not subject to bloat imposed by using a system unnecessarily complex for a minor task. If it's annotations taking up all that room, bust them out of the dbase, slap them in a simple text file and reference the file in the dbase. You don't need all that overhead in memory to deal with, leave it on the storage, not in RAM. Heck, a linked list and a couple of presorted indexes would make this thing fly. It's simply unconscionable that certain functions take so long with such a beefy processor at 1GHz.
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