NoveList Plus: Our February Resource of the Month
Every reader has had a book in their lives that made them want to go out and find something just like it so they could keep the feeling going. But the question is always how to find it, especially if they’ve already read everything by that author. NoveList Plus is an answer to that problem. With this database offered through your library, you can browse through genres and search by keywords, but in my opinion, the real magic is in the read-alike search.
I recently read Howl’s Moving Castle. It had been on my to-read list for years, because I’ve loved other works by Diana Wynne Jones and the Miyazaki animated adaption. As expected, I loved it. When I type the title into NoveList Plus, I get this page:
If I scroll down I see this:
Wow, that’s a lot of boxes, but the cool thing is that I can check as many as I want. One of the things I love about Diana Wynne Jones’ work is her unusual takes on classic expectations of fantasy worlds, so I search for other books with the same offbeat tone and focus on world-building. Here’s a choice bit of the results:
Abarat is an old favorite, a good mark that I’ve hit the right search parameters. I’ve heard good things about the Bone series, some of my favorite writers, both of comics and novels cite it as an inspiration, so I might be moving it up my to-read list. Elsewhere on the list are reminders that I haven’t read near everything by Patricia C. Wrede or Robert Asprin, two other masters of funny fantasy. Just like that, I’ve found a ton of great books pretty much guaranteed to make me smile. Of course, if the book you start from is one that gave you tears or excitement or interesting thoughts to chew over, that’s what your results will give you instead.
Happy searching.