i HEART books

I was reading up a storm over the holidays - one of my very favourite things to do!

I lurve books ;) I love the feel of them, the smell of them, the look of the type on the pages and the art on the covers. And of course, I love the magic within them.

What I also love is spending hours browsing through bookstores and deciding what will be my next read.

I've found 3 really great online sites to help make that decision even easier:

What Should I Read Next?

The Book Seer

weRead

Continue reading for a breakdown of each...

Here you can enter a book you like and the site will analyse its database of real readers' favourite books (over 65,000 and growing) to suggest what you could read next.

For example, without having to sign up to anything, I typed in The Great Gatsby (one of my all time faves) and based on other users' booklists that have read Gatsby the following recommendations were listed:

This Side of Paradise - F.Scott Fitzgerald

A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams

The Beautiful and Damned - F.Scott Fitzgerald
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance - Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

If you sign up by entering your email address you then have the ability to start building your own booklist of favourite reads at which point you can cross reference your list with other users who have similar lists to see what books they have read that you may be interested in as well.

Critique

What Should I Read Next? seems to have a few bugs at the moment though so if you get an error message with your search check your spelling and try again.

Also, it would be beneficial if reviews could be written and reviewed and titles could be organized based on genre, tags, and other similarities.

However, it was fun building my booklist to keep track of what I've read and it's interesting to compare mine to others that have similar reading tastes.

The Book Seer

Here you can type in a book title and it's author and it will bring up a list of similar titles recommended by Amazon, LibraryThing, and BookArmy.

The opening page is very simple and you just write in the title and author of a book you enjoyed. I just finished reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg and really loved it so that is the example I used.

Some of the recommended books that were retreived were other Fannie Flagg novels as well as:

Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies by Laura Esquivel
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt
Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
Where the Heart is (Oprah's Book Club) by Billie Letts

I have read some of the above books and it seems that the results have come back based on novels set in the South as Fried Green Tomatoes is. Others, such as Pigs in Heaven and Where The Heart Is also have a similar style of light-hearted prose.

Critique

This site is extremely useful if you've found an author or book you love and are simply looking for similar reads.

The recommendations from Amazon tend to just be other works written by the same author - a simple Google search could get the same results. However, the results retreived by LibraryThing are excellent. As shown above, Fried Green Tomatoes retreived either other southern tales or light-hearted reads with kooky characters.

weRead

You can access weRead through it's site here or use it as an application through social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

There is a ton of things you can do on weRead! You can build your bookslists and share them with friends, list books you are currently reading and want to read, rate books, list your favourite authors, read and write reviews, get book recommendations, etc.

Trust me, HOURS can be spent on this! LOL The greatest thing about it is that you can then share your bookshelf with your friends on social networking sites as I do on Facebook.

Critique

weRead can be slow in loading sometimes but other than that it's great!

Another great feature of weRead is that you can add a widget to your blog to display some of your bookshelf!

So, without further ado... I give you my bookshelf!

Powered by weRead

Happy Reading!!

K.

"Reading" Paintings by Renoir