Taxonomy for Booklists/Book Reviews?

Taxonomy provides a few simple features all at once. I'm going to only focus on core taxonomy but then I'll describe ways to extend it using Views and CCK.

Taxonomy module does these things:

1. Develop and manage controlled and free-tagging vocabularies as content. (We're talking pre-node here. Your vocabularies can exist before you make a single node.)
2. Classify other content (nodes) using terms in vocabularies.
3. Navigate among different pieces of content that share the same vocabulary terms.
4. Publish feeds and teaser lists of content by term.

So if your book reviews are nodes and you have separate vocabularies for (a) genre, (b) topic, (c) reading level, (d) language, you would classify a review of "Catcher in the Rye," you might classify that as (a) fiction, (b) coming of age, New York City, 20th century American sexuality, etc. etc. (c) advanced high school and (d) American English. When users come to view the review of this book, there will be links for each of those classifications. Clicking those links will take the user to a list of ALL the content that shares that classification.

Unfortunately, this pretty good feature falls short. The items are presented in chronological order. If you have other content that is being classified by these vocabularies, they will show up in the lists too.

This is where Views comes in. With Views, you can create new views that replicate the 'taxonomy/term/%' lists from Drupal core and limit them to specific content types with specific sort orders. It's not a lot of work, I promise, but it can be an adventure the first time you try.

Another problem with taxonomy is that the display of these terms on the node are often not suitable... all the classifications are lumped together and they're not distinguished by the vocabulary. I use CCK and the Content Taxonomy module to basically create CCK fields that use the vocabularies as a source of allowed values but store the values in CCK fields. This makes it easier to separate the different vocabularies when you're showing nodes in your theme.

Good luck! Get in touch if you have more taxonomy problems. It's my "thing." ;-)