Categorizing books (Adventure, Drama, Thriller, etc.)

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The solution is to put it in whatever categories you’d find it in. Don’t rely on others to do it for you.

That's fine in theory, but it's often easy to forget what one thought was the right category at the time, or to change one's mind about where a book seems to fit best.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by haertig

I'm not asking for others to do it for me. I'm looking for suggestions of what might have worked best for others, because what I'm doing now is only marginally working for me. I'm wanting to improve.

i.e., I'm looking for tips based on experience, probably gained from having book collections larger than mine - not manual labor or exhaustive research done on my behalf. I've gotten many good tips here on these forums - in this thread, and in others. Plus, people on these forums seem to be really nice and very willing to share their knowledge and experience. I appreciate that. So I'm off and running already!

My best advice is do it while you still have a few books and remember to maintain it as the collection grows.

[radius]

Originally Posted by Tarana

For adventure, I categorize Sea, Military, Spy, Survival, Epic, Pulp, European, Asian

Ah interesting, I have an Adventure category and I also overlap some of your sub-categories, but for me they are top level. ie:

Adventure
Military
Spy and thriller
Pulp and noir
Crime (hard to distinguish from the pulp and noir sometimes so I am thinking of collapsing these two)
...all at the same level.

I think I tend to consider adventure to be about exploration and seeing new lands and things of that nature. So I have authors like ERB, H Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, Kipling, Sabatini, Jack London and so on filed in Adventure.

For the problem of categories with too many titles (for me that would be SF&F) I do the alphabetical split inside instead of sub-categories.

So inside SF&F I have

ABC
...
STU
Various or anonymous
VWXYZ

Then inside the letter categories, I do author folders for any author that I have more than about five books from.

(whoah, the Mac Finder says I have 7909 items in my SF&F read folder)

I don't like to split the categories too finely because I think that only worked for books from about the turn of last century to the beginning of this one. I find for older works (I guess before publishing and bookstores really became huge?) they can cross many of what we consider to be genres today. Then for newer works, there was an explosion of micro-niches this century and now writers are crossing them more and more so it is hard to classify many of the books.

So every time I move a book to my "read" folder and choose a category for it, I also add metadata giving the number of epub pages, and some tags (like YA, non-fiction, anthology, steam punk, paranormal, etc) which helps when searching too. I used to append these to the end of the file names (since that tends to work better cross platform) but I ended up deciding this made the file names too messy.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I think your goal is unrealistic. If you're going to categorise books (and personally that's something I've never felt any urge to do), then many books do fit into more than one category. Eg Asimov's "Caves of Steel" has to be categorised as both "Crime" and "SF". Andy Weir's "The Martian" has to be "SF", "Mystery" (it's basically about solving puzzles) and Thriller" (it's certainly thrilling!).

Categories such as "SF" and "Crime" are orthogonal, not mutually exclusive.

I'd either accept that, or give up on your categorisation.

I'd say Andy Weir's "The Martian" would fit more just in the SF & Thriller categories myself. Mystery (to me) is more like who killed Col. Debenham in his study, while there is more dramatic tension via nature vs. man in "The Martian."

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by crich70

I'd say Andy Weir's "The Martian" would fit more just in the SF & Thriller categories myself. Mystery (to me) is more like who killed Col. Debenham in his study, while there is more dramatic tension via nature vs. man in "The Martian."

Whatever decision you make, my fundamental point stands: categories such as "SF" and "Thriller" or "Mystery" are not mutually exclusive, and any sensible classification method has to recognise that. That's the benefit of using collections rather than folders, of course: collections are simply tags, and you can tag a single book with multiple categories.