I stumbled upon this site by the same title. It’s a site where you can go to get suggestions for what you would like to read next based on what you have already read, and liked. You simply enter the title of a book or an ISBN number and it brings up a database of favourites entered by other readers.
To try it out I entered the title Interpreter of Maladies and surprisingly it came up in the same category as books by Edgar Allan Poe (The Murders in the Rue Morgue) and Agatha Christie (N or M? – Tommy & Tuppence Chronology), both investigative/crime stories and both full-length novels. I could hardly see the connection with my entry and I was about to leave the site in disappointment when I also found Jeffry Archer’s A Quiver Full of Arrows, a superb short story collection. I liked the affiliation. Then, I found a completely new one to me, Small Island by Andrea Levy. This caught my attention enough for a further google search and, just like that, I had found a new Must Read.
Small Island is a novel not a short story, but it does share the award winning quality of Interpreter of Maladies, having won the Orange Broad Band Prize for Fiction, Whitbread Book/Novel of the Year, among others. Its theme also revolves around the American immigrant’s experience and I can sense the author’s empathic story voice just from reading the blurb, another quality shared with Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.
The site makes claims to having more than 75, 000 different titles and more than a million reader recommendations. I have to concede this is definitely a useful site for picking out titles to go shopping around for, and I am on my way to the bookstores to find Small Island. I am definitely in with What Should IRead Next?
You should try it.
New Books Nigeria 