Ordinary Reader

Short answer, yes we can. In fact, we can’t not. Being non-judgmental, for relativist or individualist reasons, is a moral stance, and even the most individualist thinker has their limits. Thinkers opposed to conventional morality – Nietzsche, Sartre – are highly moralistic, but their judgements are different. Midgley returns to her usual position, that we are social creatures, that morality has a strong public aspect, and that we must make moral judgements, so we should get better at understanding them, and make them more deliberately.

When you are cataloging all the books you own it’s really efficient to be able to upload images of the books on shelves. But new books come into your life all the time and personally I don’t want to immediately put them on a shelf, even if I won them. I like to keep them lying around to remind me to read them. And sometimes I see a book out in the world, at a friend’s house or in a book shop, that I want to remember. In those instances I want to be able to add just one book. Fortunately, Where’s That Book now allows you to add one book by snapping its cover.

This was a frustrating book to read. The book itself is not frustrating – it’s a as clear and straightforward as it can be about such a counterintuitive subject – but I found myself frustrated while reading it. Firstly, if Modern Monetary Theory is correct then why does literally no-one in power use its insights to help solve our problems? Secondly, since I want it to me true how can I trust my own understanding of it?

When you upload pictures of your shelves the site does its best to find a match for every book. Occasionally, much to everyone’s dismay, a book is mismatched, unmatched or missed entirely - perhaps there is reflected light on the spine, or the text is too small. Now Where’s That Book offers you a way to correct these mistakes.

A really angry book, levelling the blame for poverty at the reader. The essential argument is that poverty exists because we allow it to, because it benefits the wealthier of us. To suggest that there are insufficient resources to pull everyone out of poverty is absurd, it’s just a lack of will, or, more accurately, deliberate policy. Far more government hand-outs, in the form of tax breaks on assets and wealth (things like the mortgage interest deduction) accrue the rich than traditional welfare does to the poor.

When you are cataloging your books on Where’s That Book, or creating a list of books you want to read, you might want to keep some notes about what you thought of each one, or who bought it for you, or why you should never read something by that author ever again. Now you can add those notes in the book details page.

The success of a mystery rests on its plotting. The murderer has to be someone we met reasonably early in the book, ideally a suspect considered but rejected, and the solution has to be plausible but not especially guessable. For me, outlandish mechanics (locked room mysteries and the like) don’t work in books, although they can on TV, because they reveal the hard work of the author and reading them feels like doing the kind of puzzle I do not enjoy. Watching TV is passive so as long as the pace is decent you can just get swept along.

Where’s That Book isn’t just designed for books you have at home. I’ve just added a feature that puts any book you add to one of two shelves: “Your Shelf” or “World Shelf”.