At last, a book recommendation service that makes sense to me.
Most online bookstores have “if you liked this, you might like that” lists. Based on your own purchases and personal reviews, their powerful engines process your tastes and provide you with a list of similar tasting books that may or may not meet your needs, may or may not be available, and may or may not happen to be whatever the bookstore is pushing at this time. Enter LibraryThing.
More like a library than a bookstore (and more like a literary FaceBook than a library), LibraryThing lets you catalog your books and then makes suggestions based on the libraries of other people with stuff like yours, not just on whatever you’ve bought recently. You can join reading groups, talk about books, send suggestions, post reviews, whatever. For a booklover (with a lot of free time) it’s heaven.
Cynical booklovers, however, will want to check out their Unsuggester, which will take books you like and return lists of books you really, really won’t. I suspected I would hate everything Dan Brown wrote, but it’s an amazing timesaver to have it scientifically verified. I’ve also noted that I would despise James Frey, Bret Easton Ellis, Mitch Albom, and most religious non-fiction. It’s not perfect; I like both Spider Robinson and Hunter S. Thompson, even though they come up as opposites, and I was amused to enter one of my favorite books, “The Guns of the South” by Harry Turtledove, and getting a must-avoid list back that included several of my other favorite books.
If nothing else it’s a great reverse of a standard service and may even result in some “you won’t like these, nyah nyah” reverse psychology.
I can’t say I like someone else telling me what books to read. For instance, let’s take Dan Brown: I, too, hated “The DaVinci Code”, but I thought “Angels and Demons” was pretty good. I loved “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”, but thought “Little Altars Everywhere” was pretty weak.
I also like Opinion articles, but found this one really bad. Catch my drift? What’s going on with the high gas prices?
I hated The Davinci Code, too.
It read like a combination of Stephen King at his worst and The National Enquirer