Shelfari is one of those new social-networking sites that have sprouted like mushrooms at the base of the giant Facebook tree. It calls itself a “free site that lets you share book ratings and reviews with friends and meet people who have similar tastes in books.”

Cool, right?

I got a nice-looking invitation from my friend last week, and then an auto-reminder a couple of days later. I registered on Thursday night.

Rather than reply individually to the hundreds of e-mails I have received, and continue to receive, since I signed up—a process during which I accidentally failed to uncheck the approximately 1,500 names in my Gmail address book that Shelfari had helpfully pre-checked for me, thereby inviting to join Shelfari, under my name (and ostensibly from my e-mail account), every single person with whom I have exchanged an e-mail in the past three years, in addition to every single person who has ever been on the same cc list as I have, regardless of whether we have ever met, in addition to every single listserv I have ever joined and every single Web site from which I have ever ordered anything (Amazon, Circuit City, and Law Students Against the Death Penalty have all, sadly, declined my invitation)—I thought I would write to you all here instead.