B for Books

I have always had a thing for books. Some days it's like a real addiction: I could be in a bookstore for hours and come out with bags of books. That's why when I can, I just make a membership card in a public library... it's not that all the books I read are worth keeping and they start to demand a lot of space!
Together with the buying addiction, comes the "cataloguing" addiction. I like keeping a record of what I am reading. As a kid, I'd do it manually on an old diary. Today, the web offers a variety of "social" networks that allow people to keep these records conveniently online. They are not exactly "social" because the level of interaction is actually very low. But they are good enough for the cataloging purpose I have. And fellow-readers are helpful anyway. The ANobii community actually helped me a lot finding a book I had been looking for for years!
I picked ANobii not because it is better than other networks. It's just the first I heard of and when I visited it, it was fairly enough what I was looking for. Only later on I heard of the others, LibraryThing, Goodreads.com and the like. There are blogs on the Web analyzing the differences between all these network so if you need to play with your books or keep a record of them or else, just take a look and pick the one you think fits better. To me, they are all just ok for my purposes.
Lending libraries in the Sanlitun area are not common. There are a couple of private ones, though, one being the Bookworm and the other one Le Petit Gourmand. Not all of the Beijingers might remember that once upon a time, the two entities were one and the same. They were hosted in the same low-rise building in Sanlitun, where nowadays you have the Sanlitun Village area, in a shadowy alley. You entered the space they had , and you had the restaurant (Le Petit Gourmand) on your left and the lending library (The Bookworm) on your right. When they separated, they each kept the same formula: food+books, with the Bookworm concentrating a little bit more on the latter and adding a small but good bookshop to the library.