Hi, my name is Brad, and I'm a bookaholic.

So I have to let you in on a couple of secrets. First: I have a reading queue in my blog side bar... but it's not super accurate. Yes, I plan to read all of the books in it, but my to-read queue is a bit longer than what you can see there. There are 18 books listed on my blog, but the true queue actually contains 797.

Second: reading pays. I've received 5 free books in the past 6 months or so, plus a $10 gift certificate to a local restaurant. All for reading... woohoo!

The summer reading program at the local library is pretty great--they were the source of the gift certificate. The books came from a website called Goodreads, which just so happens to be one of my favorite websites ever. Basically it's a giant database of books with social network functionality. So you create a profile and start telling the website books you've read, and marking other books that you want to read. You can rate books and leave reviews on them. You can be friends with other people who use the site and see what they are reading and what they think about it, etc. So anytime I hear about a book that sounds interesting to me, I'll go to the website, find it, and mark it as "to read". Then it doesn't have to sit in my brain anymore. I also haven't lacked for new books to read since I started using it--I know exactly what books I'm wanting to read rather than trying to remember what that cool book my buddy told me about is called. I've outsourced a nice little non-essential portion of my brain.

Now, I can't possibly read all of these books in my queue in any reasonable amount of time (at best it will be over 10 years...), but it'll keep track of them for me nonetheless. I've also figured out how to choose what to read next: I go to a random number generator and give it the number of books in the list, and the number it gives me is the next book. Sweet.

There's a section on the site called "Firstreads" where you can enter free drawings for books that are coming out soon. Publishers and authors put them up, and if you see one that strikes your fancy, you can enter for it. If you win, they send you the book for free, end of obligation. They hope you will read it and give a review, but you don't even have to do that. If you do, though, it makes it more likely that you will win more drawings in the future (as it plays into their algorithm for choosing). Out of the 5 books I've received, only one was a real stinker, so after I read it I sent it off to the DI.

Anywho, I really like Goodreads. Feel free to add me as a friend on it if you wish. Goodreads + libraries = reading bliss. Also, I've linked to my profile if anyone cares to see what it looks like.