Thing Me--Week Five Thing 11

Well, I played with Library Thing.

Liked: The Unsuggester feature--recommendations based on the opposite of a book's tags. It worked, too. I put in a Terry Pratchett book and got back unsuggestions for all sorts of humorless, right-wing, fundamentalist non-fiction.

Disliked: The Suggester feature. I entered The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and it returned a list of a dozen books with Thief somewhere in the title, as if that were the only criteria for the search. Granted, it did list the The Thief Lord by Funke, which is award winning children's literature. But The Thief Lord targets a much younger, less sophisticated child reader. By comparison, for the same book, Amazon suggested three outstanding newer YA titles: The Boy in the Striped Pants by John Boyne--Holocaust, historical fiction, Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy--Holocaust, poetic, fictionalized biography, and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation by M.T. Anderson, which while not about the Holocaust, is still historical fiction that resonates with similar themes: free will, racism, the causes of war, human rights, slavery, etc.

That said, when I called up Equal rites : a novel of Discworld by Pratchett, the page produced a decent list of titles generated from Library Thing's recommendation machine. So maybe the detail and appropriateness of the recommendations depends on the popularity of the title?

Click on the site below to see
My Library Thing Catalogue