Alphabetization

Hi All,
You've been so helpful before so I thought I would ask another newbie question or two.
For some strange reason, LibraryThing has some strange form of alphabetization. It insists on listing Chödrön, Pema right before Cheever, Benjamin. I thought that might be because of the "ö". However, now I'm noticing that it is listing Díaz, Junot right after Day, Laura, and right before De Becker, Gavin. Again, is it the fault of the accent marks? This makes no sense to me. Shouldn't all the names starting with Di be placed together? I haven't gone through the whole alphabet yet so I don't know how many more instances there are, but I'm wondering if I'm the only one with this problem.

Also, on alphabetization, when there are multiple books by the same author, sometimes the books seem to be listed by date, which makes sense to me although I would prefer to classify them alphabetically, but other times, there is no chronological or alphabetical order. Is there a rule that I'm not understanding?

Thanks in advance for your kind help!

I think we need to know where you see this. In "Your books"? If you click on one ot the column titles (like Author), you get to sort on that column and you can choose descending or ascending sort. The problem with non-ascii characters like ö is that say Danes and Swedes and Germans don't even agree where it should go, so it is kind of hopeless to define "the perfect sort order".

With titles you can choose where to start the search. On the "edit your book" page there is an anonymous little box which reveals itself as "sort from" when you click on it. Many books starting with "The " in the title will by default get a 5 when entered into LT, so "The Robots" will sort as "Robots".

I'm sure I didn't answer all of questions here, so feel free to ask again.

ETA: An older thread with same topic: https://www.librarything.com/topic/350199

As >2 bnielsen: says, there is no easy international solution to where accented characters go. I deal with German, and even the Germans can't agree on whether ö should sort as 'o', as 'oe' or after 'o'. Also some characters are coded in different ways below the surface, and this can affect how the computer deals with them. Back in my youth, it was standard library practice that Authors' Mc- and Mac- alphabetized together. That seems to have been given up. I suspect it is too hard for computers, but it really helped if you didn't know if it was McDonald or MacDonald. Throwing the special characters into two or three places that feel random is certainly not optimal, but it's what we're stuck with until there is a wider solution than just LT.

LT will allow you to alphabetize on two co,umns. If you use the sort icon (arrows up and down, the popup is clear. If you want to click on columns, you need to click on your second sort first, and then your primary sort. In other words, for your example, first click on the title, and once that sort is done, click on the author column. Now it sorts on author, but within an author, by title.
(Assuming you have entered the author's name consistently.)

Thank you both so much! You totally solved the multiple book problem for me. And I'm tempted to just remove the first umlaut from Pema's last name so that all the "o's" can be together. Or I just might practice living with the imperfection!