The Book Seer

The Book Seer thinks it's pretty smart: tell it the last book title you've read, along with the author, and it will let you know some reasonably similar titles to pick for your next foray into literary entertainment. Overall, it does a pretty good job of what it claims to accomplish, and the interface is fun. Don't expect to get recommendations based on recent books, or small-press titles, though: the last few books I've read were new releases, and haven't been in the system long enough for connections to grow. The Book Seer doesn't come up with recommendations on its own; the site is essentially a cool interface to pull data from three book-related websites: Amazon.com, LibraryThing, and BookArmy. The LibraryThing recommendations, at least for the books I queried, were the most thorough and relevant. Amazon's were OK, but fewer relevant ones by my measure. Sadly, I don't think BookArmy gave a single recommendation for anything I entered. Try it out for fun, but I don't think it'll become a need-fulfilling go-to website for book lovers.

Recommended To Me: The Children's Blizzard

Last weekend I had the opportunity to chit-chat with KFYR's morning weatherman from Bismarck, and the discussion turned to the always-exciting subject of homesteader mortality on the territorial prairies of the 19th century. Romanticism of time-travel aside, neither of us have any interest in trying to live like they did, when a fall from a horse or a bad tooth could result in death. In fact, so much was unknown, everyone was so on their own, that it is hard to believe anyone lasted more than one winter. he recommended a book he is reading called The Children's Blizzard, an account of the Blizzard of 1888. The weather was mild, there were no warnings on the horizon, no NOAA weather service to break into daytime television, and as children were preparing to walk the few short miles back home from school, a whiteout blizzard hit. A surprising number survived, but the hundreds that didn't make it was enormously tragic to the families and communities that were struggling against enormous odds to begin with. Sad stories don't always appeal to me, but when a wheatherman is reading a book about a snowstorm, it must be worth the read.