Some time ago I mentioned that I haven't kept track of all the books I've read. One reason was that once I started writing things down I had too many ideas.

In addition to the title of a book and the author, I wanted to keep track of the copyright date so that I could build a timeline of that author's work. Yes, I know it's probably on the Internet somewhere, but this was my own discovery process.

In addition to the story copyright date, I'd be keeping track of what edition of the book it was and whether it was revised from the initial version. I hate it when a story written and set in 1935 is updated in 1960 or 1970 something to take out references to running boards on cars and other cultural references deemed defunct. Those updates are akin to the outrage of colorizing the black and white movies. If it was a revised version, I would be tempted to try to locate a newer version.

Then, I would have a field in my database (oh yes, a real computer database) for where the title of the book came from. As a preliminary to that sometimes I make a note inside the back cover of my current book of the page number where the title is explained. A good author to do this with is John D. MacDonald with the Travis McGee series: The Quick Red Fox, Pale Gray for Guilt, Dress Her in Indigo are just three of them. In every one of these books, at some point in the story the exact phrase of the title will be worked into the narrative.

The other thing that I wanted to do was pull out little hints about the characters from the output of prolific writers to make timelines of the characters' lives. For example Rex Stout's Archie Goodwin (Nero Wolfe's sidekick). Archie was always a ladies man, and the Nero Wolfe stories start in the 1930s when he's a young guy flirting with the women. But in books copyrighted in the 1960s Archie's getting a little long in the tooth to be as attractive as he thinks he is to 23 year-old women.

In the case of Dick Francis, I would have kept track of the occupations of the protagonists in each of his stories because they are already different and interesting.

Well, as much as I would have liked to be able to leaf through a list of all the books I have read over the years, I'm afraid that would only have caused discontent because why hadn't I written down all that other stuff. It would have been nice to put it all together and all of the mysteries would have been solved once and for all.