The Old Gray Mare....

...she ain't what she used to be.  Well, in this case the "old gray mare" is my memory.  I used to be able to keep up with all the authors I read on a regular basis, their series titles, the character's names, the plots, and most importantly: the series order.

I have noticed for a while now that I'm utilizing the Fantastic Fiction site a lot more often for series information.  But it really hit me last night when I inadvertently started the sixth book in a series. I got about 20 pages into it before I realized the author was referring to things I had no clue about and therefore those things had probably taken place in an earlier installment of the series.  Being tired enough to be frustrated, not able to remember the title of the first book in the series, and not willing to leave my comfy bed to go into the office and look it up,  I simply switched to another book that I knew was a stand-alone, but that's not going to be a solution all the time.  It probably doesn't help the problem that I've relatively recently (within the past two years) exponentially increased the amount of series books that I follow spanning three different genres.

This time I can't blame the sheer amount of books that I keep on the Sony - because I wasn't reading on the Sony, I was reading on my brand spanking new shiny (well, not really, it's a gray rubberized material) Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight that I got for Mother's Day. (Squeeee!!)  I've so far only loaded a tiny fraction of my library on it, so I didn't have a lot to keep up with.

Improving my memory at this late date probably isn't going to happen, not with the last semester of school breathing down my neck and increasing my brain's already overcrowded storage problem.  So I need a way to either sort the books by series order on the Nook, or...something.  I might try experimenting with the Shelves feature and load series by order into that, perhaps....

UPDATE: I realize that I have maybe three readers on a good day, but just perhaps if someone is looking for a solution to order series on their Nook - here is an insanely helpful link using regular expressions in Calibre:

http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/NOOK-First-Edition-General/Organizing-Books-In-a-Series/m-p/1149440/message-uid/1149440#U1149440

I can vouch for this, because I just tried it with the Tasha Alexander Emily Ashton series and it worked like a charm.  Now I'm really glad I didn't indulge my OCD and load *everything* from calibre onto my Nook last night, or I'd be spending a lot of time deleting it all and replacing it.

Also, another helpful hint if you use calibre: If you want covers to show up on the NST with Glow (and probably the NST as well),  be sure you get your cover and metadata the way you want it within calibre and then do an epub to epub conversion to make the cover "stick".