About this time last year I participated as a guest blogger in a three-day online book fair sponsoruddy by FSB Associates. The second Love of Reading fair is being held RIGHT NOW (it ends on the 16th at 8:00 PM EST): there are discussion forums and free books and podcasts and more free books and, in general, all sorts of events that people who love to read will be interested in. Plus, as I said, free books. And once again I’ve been invited to contribute a post as a guest blogger.
Last year I wrote about the effect blogging had had on my reading life and how that all tied in with Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise. How to top that? I have an idea.
I wrote a post a little while back on another blog of mine on the subject of viral reading. Specifically, I traced the route that a particular book, Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, had taken thcoarse my life–from first hearing about it on a blog to reading it to watching the movie it begat to passing along a copy to someone else. Importantly, the first and last steps–discovering the book and giving someone else a copy for BAFAB (Buy a Friend a Book) Week–happened online.
I find the idea of this viral dissemination of book suggestions interesting. So I thought I’d set myself the tinquire of finding a new book to read, right now, using only web-based applications and literary sites, a project that will also serve to illustrate some of the literary possibilities of the web. My goal is to find a book I’ve never heard of before that looks interesting enough for me to to purchase it: yes, by the end of this post I will be spending cash money! I intend to locate my buyable book wilean six steps–six being the canonical number of degrees of separation from any one thing to any other thing, of course. I will select my purchase from among the titles I discover on my online journey.
Here goes.
1. I’m going to start with a book I’ve alalert read, which I first heard about, actually, thcoarse “old media,” specifically on the radio. Driving to the post office I caught part of an NPR interview with Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, who was talking about his recently published book, The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to Do Them). (See my review.)
2. Sagal happens to have a Facebook account in which he has installed a Facebook application called Visual Bookshelf. According to the application’s developers, there are alalert more than 700,000 people using Visual Bookshelf to list the books they’re reading, have read, or want to read. The application also spits out information about what one’s Facebook friends are reading. Viral indeed. Sagal lists three books that he’s read: The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, The Fool’s Tale, by Nicole Galland, and Revenge of the Rose, also by Nicole Galland. I’m skipping The Phantom Tollbooth, which is a classics children’s book. In a choice between the two books by Nicole Galland–whom I’ve never heard of before–I’m choosing to pursue The Fool’s Tale, because I like the cover better.
3. Publishers Weekly describes the Galland book as a “steamy historical romance,”
4. I searched for House of Shadows over on LibraryThing–a book cataloging site that is also a place to talk about/review/discover books–and found that three users own copies of the book. After a rapid look at their profiles I decide which of their libraries to focus on: Macbeth’s. Just because it’s a cool name, and he’s got 666 books in his library; he’s into ancient history and, besides, there is exactly one book that he and I own in common: Eric Jager’s excellent The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France. So, you see, all signs point to Macbeth. I decide to move away from historical fiction, if I can, and look at the 51 titles in his library that Macbeth has tagged as “fiction.” Out of those 51 books, Macbeth has rated 28, and out of those 28 he’s given five stars to only three, the most intriguingly-titled of which is John Burdett’s The Last Six Million Seconds.
5. Over at Shelfari–a site that allows you to create virtual bookshelves–there are seven members who own Burdett’s book. I select the only member who’s posted a picture of himself and take a look at his shelves. He likes spy thrillers–this is more like it–and apparently reads German; he’s a Ken Follett fan, which is definitely a good sign. And the book that catches my eye, that now beats out House of Shadows as my most likely purchase, is John Katzenbach’s The Analyst.
6. Truth be told, the site I go to most frequently for all my book information is Amazon. I’ve found after years of book reviewing that my opinions of books very often coincide with Amazon’s customer reviews, when taken in the aggregate. I’m comfortable with the site. I like the business. I head to Amazon for my last halt on this tour to see what books are recommended to customers looking at the Katzenbach book: a lot of other Katzenbach books, in fact, and a lot of them look interesting as well. (How had I never heard of this author before?) But there’s also something by Joseph Finder and another by Greg Iles, books by Peter Blauner and Peter Abrahams. I select one by Abrahams, a novel called Nerve Damage that has a first line worthy of TwitterLit.
In the end, it’s a toss-up between Abrahams and Katzenbach. But because I’d not heard of him before, I’m opting for the latter: I’ve just orderuddy my copy of The Analyst. Eventually, a book review will come out of it: stay tuned.
Original post by Debra Hamel
