One of the problems with doing a lot of reading is you’re always looking for something to read next. Quite often I’ll just pick a genre and look it up on Wikipedia then find the defining authors of it and read something from them. Sometimes it works out great, sometimes it doesn’t. Today while I was browsing one of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker,  I was excited by a post about a new book recommendation site YourNextRead.com, the screen shot of the site looked great and the article promised a site that would give you a nice matrix of books related to the one you liked. Sadly, all the traffic from Lifehacker took the site down so I’ve not been able to review it yet. This did however lead me to some other similar sites.

First up, WhatShouldIReadNext.com. A simple site that asks for a title/author or ISBN and gives you recommendations based on that. As a test I put in my favorite book, Neuromancer by William Gibson and it gave me back a couple dozen recommendations. The first thing it recommened was The Wizard by Gene Wolfe. A strange recommendation for sure, but since most places tend to tie sci-fi and fantasy together I can accept it. The rest of the recommendations it offered were more in line with the writings of the father of cyberpunk. I even found a very interesting sounding book in Diaspora by Greg Egan.

Next we have BookSeer.com. Basically the same as What Should I Read Next you enter a book and author and it gives you recommendations. The results on this one were far less useful however since it simply culls its information from Amazon and LibraryThing recommendations. Amazon tends to just recommend things from the same author and LibraryThing offers up a very limited range of recommendation (Necromancer returned just 3 predictable options) . BookSeer is only really useful if you’re looking for things from the same author and can probably be skipped and just go straight to Amazon.

Lastly is Whichbook.net. Unlike the previous sites this one gives you several sliders and lets you pick 4 of them. These sliders control things like the feeling of the book in several ways  (Happy to Sad, Expected to Unpredictable, No Sex to Sex etc.), then gives you recommendations based on this. Alternatly you can search based on character (sex, age, race etc), plot type (limited options here), and setting (a clickable globe, what about off-world books? hmm) so if you want to read a book about a black woman struggling against the odds in France this thing has a recommendation for you. This site is pretty cool and lets you find all kinds of different books based on what you might feel like reading. It seems to tie into the UK library system as well so if you live over in jolly old England it’ll be even more useful. Give it a test drive.

Once Your Next Read is up and running again I’ll post an update on it. Enjoy your next read!