As this is a blog aimed at people who like to read, I thought I would pass on a suggestion from Mark Frauenfelder, from the latest issue of the newsletter Recomendo:
"book.sv, is a free book recommendation engine built by scraping 43 million Goodreads users. I entered about ten favorite books, and the results impressed me. It surfaced other books I’ve read and loved, validating its taste-matching algorithm. More exciting were the new titles it suggested: intriguing picks I hadn’t encountered before (like Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze). Unlike Goodreads’ algorithm, this feels like getting suggestions from someone who actually understands my reading taste. — MF"
So I decided to try it. I entered 14 favorite books, ones that I had read more than once, and it gave me 30 book recommendations. Most were titles I knew about, all were authors I had heard of. Nineteen were books I had already read, which I guess shows that the recommendations work; I liked almost all of the books I had read, although a couple did not impress me much. There were only a couple of books I don't know much about, Light by M. John Harrison and The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies. But the recommended book I am likeliest to read next is The Magus by John Fowles; Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea were both Fowles fans. I probably should also try The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth. (I read The Floating Opera in college and liked it, but I've never read any other Barth. RAW liked him.)
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