This was kind of a bizarre and a little bit disturbing story. A doctor gets called on a house-visit to diagnose the sore throat of a little girl. However, each time the doctor tries to look down her throat she freaks out. First she tried clawing at his eyes, then was held down by her father screaming, then she bit down on the tongue depressor, splintering it which caused her mouth to bleed, then he roughly shoved a metal spoon down her throat until she gagged. She indeed have a sickness and has been hiding it for days, mystery solved.
The weird part about this story was that the doctor was a little bit insane. He actually started to enjoy it more and more as the girl fought back. He even goes as far to mention that he had fallen in love with the little brat. Eventually he started to go a little insane, wanting to and loving to tear her apart with his own bare hands, “It was my pleasure to attack her.” Finally he sees her throat but not after a disturbing set of thoughts that ran through his mind, nothing too graphic but disturbing nonetheless. I can’t say that I would recommend reading it, I know I surely wouldn’t read it again.
About the Author William Carlos Williams:
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine with a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Williams “worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician” but excelled at both.
When I first started riding the train to work every day (two years ago) I found a great Facebook App called “Virtual Bookshelf” which allowed me to keep track of and share the books that I had been reading. I liked it because I could keep track of the books I was reading (one every 2-3 weeks), share it with other people seamlessly, and I could see which books my friends were reading. It’s one thing to read a review from someone you don’t know on Amazon.com but it’s quite another to read a review written by a friend, I’m much more likely to take it seriously and make a purchasing decision as a result.
Anyway, Virtual Bookshelf randomly disappeared from the scene about a year after I started using it. Shortly thereafter I found a different website called GoodReads.com (founded in 2007) which seemed to be much more popular than the Virtual Bookshelf Facebook App (78 million books and 2.9 million users). Despite it’s popularity, I found the user interface to be pretty oldschool, i.e. hard to navigate and a cluttered aesthetic. No big deal because it had a thriving user-base with tons of reviews, book clubs, and activities. However, it still drove me crazy that they were creating their own social network. As a virtual book shelf you can’t create a culture that comes even close to Facebook/Twitter/etc so why try. Why not integrate with the powerhouses that are already there. No one wants to duplicate their already well-established (and sometimes overwhelming) social networks. That’s what I liked the most about the previous Facebook App, it synced with your actual friends and not a self-selecting random group of strangers who go out of their way to be a part of a separate social media network for books. When I started the short stories month I found out that they had some pretty decent widgets for bloggers:
Then after some more research I found two other virtual bookshelves: LibraryThing and Shelfari. After reading a few reviews and checking out the website for LibraryThing I was immediately turned off because it looked archaic, it didn’t sync well with social media, and it had fewer users than both GoodReads and Shelfari. Shelfari is an Amazon.com product so I immediately gravitated toward it (acquired by Amazon in 2008). They can make money with Shelfari by driving traffic to purchasing pages so I made the assumption that their site would likely be pretty up to date and easy to use (read: easy to use and then to buy stuff from amazon.com). Well, that assumption was right. It’s a much cleaner and usable interface than GoodReads, also, the widgets are much better (fewer lines of HTML, cleaner, more functional, etc):
From what I’ve seen/experienced it seems like GoodReads is better in terms of quality of content, i.e. there are more users, more reviews, more book clubs, and overall a stronger community. However, from a different perspective, Shelfari is better in terms of ease of use, visual aesthetic, and compatibility with social media. GoodReads will certainly auto-post status updates to Facebook but they make you dig for it whereas with Shelfari, the social media is up front and center. I don’t really have the time or the level of interest to be involved in a cluttered yet thorough book-club-esque site like GoodReads. It certainly does well in the virtual world of reading but it’s definitely for people who have a strong reading hobby who don’t mind the B- web programming. For my purposes (daily life, blog, etc) Shelfari is the sure winner. I want something that’s easy to use, that catalogues my books in an easy and accessible way, and allows me to share them with my friends in a hassle free way. Also, as I mentioned earlier, Shelfari is an Amazon product, meaning they are likely to keep it in good condition because it has the potential to result in revenue for the company. Therefore, my bets are on Shelfari over GoodReads.
![The Statistical Sleuth: A Course in Methods of Data Analysis [With CDROM]](http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171057999s/84916.jpg)
