After finishing a novel, the new task becomes finding the next read.
This weekend, I finished “Gone Girl,” a thrilling, marvelous read by Gillian Flynn, in a matter of hours and I wanted to discover more dark mystery novels.
Goodreads, a website dedicated to recommending books, came across my radar several times this year and I decided to try it.
To work the site, you compile a list of books you have read, mark the genres you prefer to read and an algorithm provides suggestions for your future reads.
You can even link your list of purchased books from Amazon without having to recall each one you have ever bought.
This tool sounded like a gift from the reading gods.
Half the battle of reading begins with finding a worthwhile book.
I have spent hours up and down the aisles of bookstores, searching for the next best find.
Sometimes I nab one off the best sellers stack or pick a thick, juicy one from the genre section I’m craving. And, confession time, I even grabbed books because the cover looked incredible and the synopsis in the jacket cover was decent.
My methods for picking novels in the past don’t adhere to a pattern, but resemble a hitchhiker’s guide to random book selecting.
Goodreads seemed like a solution to my scatterbrained reading process.
I listed on the site the first 40 books I could think of off the top of my head and prayed for the salvation of reading.
My results were books with themes similar to my previous reads and I had not heard of most of the titles given.
Though I do love an indie read, I felt as if I had stumbled upon oddball territory with these suggestions.
In all honesty, my hopes fell when I did not see any recommendations that tingled my bookworm senses.
For instance, the entirety of the young adult suggestions was a bust (while I’m legally, physically and mentally an adult, I do partake in reading spicy YA novels).
I have noticed that ?because of my trend of reading vampire books in my teens, the recommendations for the YA category sadly looked like a Twilight fangirl’s dream.
I began to realize that my suggestions were infrequent because that’s how my previously read list looked.
No matter how many books I had listed, I continued to receive recommendations that were far out of left field.
I believe I could not get an accurate analysis of my tastes because I have read and picked all different types of books.
One would think I just ran around books stores and grabbed blindly, which on some level is my reality.
Not only did I receive a plethora of weird books but I did not get anything relatively new.
With this site, I wasn’t able to experience fresh kinds of books with different themes because all my suggestions were too similar to the books I’ve read.
I thought if Netflix could understand my groovy movie soul, Goodreads would surely recognize my need to read. Sadly, this did not happen.
But while the suggestions don’t look appetizing, I’m going to have to try them at least once before I knock them.
I’m too optimistic about book picking to give up, so I’ll select at least one from each genre to read.
However, I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying Goodreads.
My reading patterns, dear readers, don’t correlate with this system.
That is not to say yours won’t. It can work for some readers, matching them with books they never knew about.
I want everyone to try Goodreads, because even one spot-on suggestion will bring a wonderful book into your life. Make that list and get an idea of what you love about your favorite novels.
If it can cut your selection time down, that leaves more time for reading.
And of course, more reading is always a good thing.
