What to read next?

If you are an avid reader like me, you probably never have the problem of "what to read next". Your problem is more likely to be the good old "so many books, so little time".

I can't help you there.

But should you need help with choosing what to read next, or if you just like playing around with all sorts of book related things (What do you mean, I should get a life?), I'd like to share something I discovered the other day.

It's called Whichbook, and it is a book recommendation service which enables you to discover books in various ways. There are lists, for example, alphabetical title lists, author lists and categories such as "short and sweet", "bad luck and trouble", "slapstick" and so on. It also includes menus where you can find books with certain kinds of characters, settings or plots, and scales where you can move a dial between two opposites, such as "happy" or "sad", "beautiful" or "disgusting", "gentle" or "violent" etc. Whichbook will then give you recommendations based on these criteria along with short descriptions and even sample passages from these books.

While I certainly have more than enough books on my TBR list (my list on Goodreads is over 100 titles long and that does not include books I've already bought but haven't read yet)... and even though every time I step into the library, books seem to just fly from the shelves onto my arms, begging "Take me with you! Take me home!"... I found Whichbook immensely interesting. All right, I have a cold and lack the energy to do much anything, and this is one way of amusing myself. ;) Apart from one area of improvement ("settings" choices only include geographical settings, while historical periods would be extremely useful for historical fiction fans), it seems that Whichbook is quite clever in its suggestions: many books recommended to me sounded fascinating.