Books and Authors
Last week we took a look at the Novelist reading advice tool, now I want to talk about another online tool. Books and Authors is similar to Novelist in that you can easily find thousands of books to read just by clicking around. You get to it the same way you get to Novelist: point at the purple Find Answers tab, choose Research Databases, then choose Literary Sources and finally click on Books and Authors.
Books and Authors is a little more polished and modern looking than Novelist, and there are a few really neat options. You can choose to create an account and keep track of lists of books you’d like to read, authors you enjoy and even write reviews of books you’ve read and save them for access later. You can also use the browse function and browse through hundreds of thousands of titles, clicking on those that pique your fancy.
Like Novelist, there are lists of award winners and expert-created booklists. One really neat feature is the Recommended Similar Reads list for most novels. Let’s say that I really enjoyed the book The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. If I search that title and open the screen about it, I find a list of 15 other books I may alos enjoy. Turns out, I’ve read 8 of the recommended books, and I did enjoy them! They aren’t all exactly alike - The Historian is about an academic’s search for Dracula, while the recommended The Egyptologist is about intrigue and murder surrounding an archeological dig in Egypt - but all share some similarities. You can also use the Read-A-Like Wizard to specify what exactly it is you enjoyed about a particular book and find some similar reads.
Spend some time with the Books and Authors database and I guarantee you’ll find something new and interesting to read. Give us a call at the Reference Desk if you have troubles using it and we’ll try to help you out as much as we can.
Tags: books, databases, reader's advisory