Books, Readers and Beyond: #52 What to Read

1) Using Blindness by Jose Saramago, I began in NoveList Plus, clicked on "Find Similar Books" and restricted the reading level to "adults." The search came up with multiple titles, but the top three included: Tale of a Certain Orient by Milton Hatoum, The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho, and Ship of the Hunted by Yehudah Elberg. The reviews made them seem like books I would enjoy reading based on the fact that I enjoyed reading Blindness.

The What Should I Read Next site began by listing other books by Jose Saramago and then several by Mario Vargas Llosa. The suggested titles looked like interesting reads, but they were not as thematically similar to Blindness as the suggestions provided by NoveList Plus.

Finally, I tried Allreaders.com and looked up Blindness. The search results included a couple of YA titles and one Jodi Picoult book that seemed way off target. Also, there were many annoying pop-up ads. I don't think this is a site I'd use again.

2) To find books for the 4th grade girl, I went to NoveList Plus, selected the "Recommended Reads" link for "Older Kids" on the left side of the page, and then selected "Animal Stories." I found Diary of a Killer Cat by Anne Fine, noted the reading level and made sure we hade copies in the HCPL catalog. To change things up, I decided to search for a non-fiction title. I used an advanced search-subject "cats"-using limits to keep the lexile reading level within the range for a 4th grade reader. Among the results was Mother to Tigers by Ella Lyon George, which we also had in HCPL.

For the 13 year old brother, I selected the "Recommended Reads" link under "Teens (13-18)." I found a book about paranormal activities titled Unexplained by Judy Allen (YA Non-Fic 001.94 All) under the "Curiosities" section. I then found The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh, which is a YA fiction title involving ghosts.

3) In NoveList Plus, I used the "Author Read-Alikes" feature to look up Dean Koontz. The dtatbase provides a detailed description of Koontz's style before listing several read-alike authors and representative titles, including Greg Bear whose fiction NoveList Plus describes as combining medical, scientific, and paranormal elements; and horror/thriller author John Saul.

For the second one, I tried a link from the Librarian in Black's blog to a site called Literature-Map. After entering Dean Koontz's name, the site created a name cloud of similar authors with the most similar names closest to the center. In this case, two of the closest were James Patterson and Thomas Harris. I believe the data for this is drawn from user input, so it's hard to tell what kind of controls are in place.

4) I used Mid-Continent Public Library's website on juvenile series and found the list as follows for the Song of the Lioness Series: 1) Alanna: The First Adventure; 2) In the Hand of the Goddess; 3) The Woman Who Rides Like A Man; and 4) Lioness Rampant.