I belong to a group on Facebook called “What Should I Read Next?” It is mobbed by more than 53,000 eager readers who seem equally motivated to share what they like and learn what others have discovered. I joined the group for a few different reasons:

1. I wanted to keep up with what was popular out there right now with regular readers (not librarians, reviewers, and other colleagues);
2. I saw it as a chance to practice my own readers’ advisory skills in a social media format, to see what works best;
3. I thought by sharing my reviews, I could find more followers for my obscure little blog!

It’s actually working quite well: I’m discovering that many readers fish in a shallow pond of popular titles and are therefore all reading a lot of the same books, which both gives me those titles and also allows me to make suggestions of others not as popular but perhaps as good or better reads. I am learning a lot about how to work as an advisor in a written online format; after I referred someone to a book by writing a short synopsis in the comments, three separate people wrote back to me and said some variation of, “I wish other people would give a little description with their recommendations so I would know whether I would even be interested in looking this book up on Amazon or Goodreads.” So now, every time I make a recommendation, I throw in either a short annotation or at the least some characteristic of the book that I think people would be interested to know (such as, “It develops slowly but the characters are so lifelike you expect to meet them on the street and invite them for coffee!”). And both my Facebook page and this blog have picked up a dozen new followers since I began this “relationship” with other online readers.

I am also discovering that, like many librarians who think they have good readers’ advisory skills, regular people also think it is sufficient to recommend a book based on what they like, rather than trying to find out what the person who is asking might prefer. I get a little impatient sometimes when a mom asks for realistic books for her 13-year-old son and someone posts “Harry Potter!” Harry Potter is not the answer to everyone’s reading needs, people!

Anyway, suffice to say that the interaction with the subscribers to this page is really highlighting and pinpointing their needs, along with how poorly they are being served when people concentrate too much on the books and not on the readers themselves.

Recently, someone wrote that her mother was about to have surgery and had asked her to stockpile some titles she would enjoy during recovery. The criteria was, “She likes books that take place at the beach. Her dream is to live in a lighthouse.”

People immediately started throwing out names of authors who write books that are set on the Outer Banks, the Jersey shore, or the beaches of Cornwall. Some of them fall into the category of actual “beach reads”—that is, lightweight and frothy, perfect for a summer vacay book. Others, though, had such a wide variety of styles and stories that I wondered, “Would anyone really read books just because they were set in a preferred location?”

Then I thought about myself and the many books I have read that were set on the streets of Paris, and how some of them, though
frankly mediocre, still pulled a decent rating from me because of their evocative development of “setting.” So, as an experiment (since I also like the ocean), I am reading a few of the books mentioned, to see if the right “environment” in a book can offset such things as poor writing, shallow character development, or the lack of a cohesive
story line.

I also proposed to one reader who was a big fan of Kate Morton that she might, if she likes mysteries, also enjoy the books of Tana French. She had never heard of French, and asked me why I thought so. My reply was, People who like Kate Morton are willing to accept extremely slow pacing while Morton sets up place and characters in what sometimes lasts hundreds of pages. Tana French, although writing in a different genre, subscribes to the same style.

My premise here is that people who are willing to read in multiple genres may still gravitate to the same type of book in terms of reading appeal, i.e., this slow pacing shared by these two authors, rather than picking something fast-paced in one and slow in another. I don’t know whether that reader will take me up on the Tana French challenge; she said “Thanks for the tip” rather than “I’ll rush right out and read one.” But I’m hoping that if she does, she will come back to me and confirm or deny my theory. (I realize that basing it on one person isn’t good data collection, but everything starts with a first step….)

I will report back on these ponderings!