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Electronic Highways
Book recommendations online
Oprah's Book Club® may be defunct, but readers can turn to a wide variety of readers' advisory sites online. Such sites provide booklists and recommendations, information on popular fiction, author profiles, genre and book news, as well as links to reviews, online discussion groups and other Internet sites devoted to particular genres or authors.
BookBrowser http://www.bookbrowser.com/ offers a collection of fiction reading lists, book reviews and forthcoming titles. Unique features include sequel lists in story order (rather than in order of publication date), a read-alike site ("if you lik…try…") and lists of fiction arranged by place and time. "Readers' Resources" include authors' pseudonyms, interviews, a calendar of signings and events, and links to genre-specific listservs, such as Dorothy-L (mystery fiction) or RRA-L (Romance Reader's Anonymous). The site has a search engine and is updated weekly.
Fiction_L http://www.webrary.org/rs/FLmenu.html is an electronic mailing list devoted to reader's advisory issues. Visitors may search the archives by subject or simply jump to Fiction_L's extensive collection of booklists. The booklists are divided by genre, character, setting, subject, author and audience. Within each division, readers will find fascinating and quirky reading lists, such as "fictional presidents" and "edible fiction."
Interactive book-recommendation sites still are in the experimental stage, but Allreaders.com http://www.allreaders.com is an example of what is to come. Using the "detailed search" box, one can search for books by specifying detailed plot characteristics, themes, settings and structures. Another interactive site that has great potential is the Reader's Robot http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/rr.html. Although the site presently emphasizes science fiction and mystery, other genres are forthcoming. Users tell the "robot" what they like to read, and it retrieves recommendations of other readers with similar tastes. This database also can be searched by "appeal factors" such as length, style and character types.
Book Muse http://www.bookmuse.com offers readers an in-depth look at books popular with book-discussion groups and includes brief plot summaries, discussion questions, leaders' tips, literary analysis, author biographies and suggestions for further reading. Publisher sites also are good sources for guides for book discussion groups. Vintage Books Reading Group Guides http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read is representative, providing more than 50 guides to selected recent fiction and non-fiction, discussion topics and questions, author info, an online book club and more.
As reading groups and book clubs proliferate, the number of online readers' advisory sites continues to grow. Readers' advisory sites will allow you to add even more titles to those leftover summer-reading lists. Happy reading!
—Brenda Battleson and Austin Booth, University Libraries