Books, Readers and Beyond: #52 "Should I Read This?"

Usually, when people at the library ask me, "Should I read this?" I hesitate to answer. How should *I* know? Don't YOU know? But since part of my job is to at least point them in the right direction, my first question to them is, "Well, what was the last book you read?" If the last book was similar in style and difficulty to the title in question, then probably their new choice is a good one. However, if the only reason they want to read the book is because Oprah recommended it...well, I'll try to steer them another direction. For example, a customer asked me if she should read O's latest pick (at that time), Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. And the customer's last book? That would be (drumroll) Apocolipstick by Sue Margolis. (silence...sound of crickets chirping) Not exaaactly similar genres. Needless to say I pointed her towards some nice, safe chick lit titles. For this exercise, I picked one of my current favorites, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and used Novelist Plus to find a read-alike. This database searched by keywords and tags and found mostly World War II books or books written in the form of letters. I then used What Should I Read Next and found titles recommended by readers, which I found to be more helpful. Coincidentally, one title, A Month of Summer, by Lisa Wingate caught my eye just last week. Library Thing made some great suggestions also, including The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry, which has been on my TBR list for awhile. Exercise 2 asked us to find two books for a 4th grade girl who likes animals and two books for a 13 year old boy who likes ghost stories. Librarybooklists.org was very helpful in finding not only obvious choices like Charlotte's Web by E.B. White but also Wackiest Whitehouse Pets by Kathryn Gibbs Davis. As for the teen ghost fan, I found great YA books like Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins and Daemon Hall by Andrew Nance. Exercise 3 had us searching for books similar to Dean Koontz's. WhatshouldIreadnext.com made it easy to find Castle Waiting: The Lucky Road by Linda Medley, Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan and The Suicide Collectors by David Oppegaard. Novelist Plus turned up similar mixtures of sci-fi and horror with Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio and Summer of Night by Dan Simmons. Finally, in Exercise 4, the task was to find the next in a series of books starting with Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce. This was simple using Mid-Continent Public Library 's series database. The next titles in the YA Song of the Lioness series are: In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man and Lioness Rampant. Whew! I found this an interesting, if exhaustive, exercise regarding research. Perhaps two out of four of these lessons would have been sufficient. No time to read now....