List-making, privacy, and indie publishing

Having worked at a small nonprofit press and bookstore, I regard the big online book sellers with trepidation and buy from them only with severe guilt. Did you know that some of them are notorious for taking forever and sometimes failing to pay smaller book publishers that they order from? The place I worked last year finally had to write off big debt from an invoice. True story.

However, they do have excellent list-making and other user-based (and, lets admit, user-tracking) programs. I'm fond of the Wish List option on Amazon. It reminds me of what I want to be reading -- and what I should probably purchase directly from the publishers, if they sell direct. 

I sometimes wonder about list making and the purposes it serves to us - as people, as writers. A way not to forget? Fostering some sense of accomplishment? Helping us reorder things in our brain? Some f/Friends of mine recently put together a great writing workshop model, and list making was one of the exercises. As a way of getting things out and getting the writing started. 

Bloggers seem to do it too -- ten things I'm happy about, ten things you don't know about me, etc. Maybe it's one of those easy-blog-post-models that people whip out when they're strapped for time or ideas. 

Lists, especially on commercial web sites (even if you never buy from them) also raise really interesting privacy concerns. I sometimes wonder what portrait someone would get from me if they made a composite of my blog, my Amazon lists, and my Facebook profile. 

So in honor of Amazon and easy blog posts, and of having nothing to hide, here's a selection of FIVE books from my Amazon wish list. They're not all new, but they from my four favorite independent small publishers: 

Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racism Reflections from an Angry White Male by Tim Wise. Softskull, 2008. 

The Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scape-goating of Femininity. 

Seal Press, 2007

Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity by Matt Bernstein Sycamore. Seal, 2006

Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire by David Graeber. AK, 2007. I'm even more excited about Graeber's Direct Action: An Ethnography, which isn't out yet. 

Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-it-Ourselves Guide By Scott Kellog and Stacy Pettigrew. South End Press, 2008. 

What do you want to be reading? What lists are you making? What information about you could be gathered from internet sites where you list favorites, or things you want to do, get, be?