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Madame Claire by Susan Ertz

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I first heard about Susan Ertz from one of the Persephone Quarterlies, when they put a list of titles they were vaguely considering publishing. (I should dig out that PQ for further reading suggestions, thinking about it.) I can’t remember which book they recommended, but the name was distinctive enough that I’ve kept an eye out for her over the years – and have three on my shelves. Madame Claire (1923) is the first one I’ve read.

Who is Madame Claire, you ask? She is the matriarch of a several-generation family, 78 years old and living in a hotel. As the novel opens, she has reconnected with a close friend – Stephen – whom she has not seen for nearly two decades, as he disappeared from her life when she (as a recent widow) turned down his proposal for marriage. They have begun writing again. And it is an elegant conceit for her to bring him up to speed on her extended family…

These cover some favoured tropes of 1920s domestic novels. One of her children, Eric, is in a loveless marriage (or, rather, one where the love has become buried beneath resentment and bitterness); another, Connie, has abandoned her husband and is living with a man who doesn’t truly care for her. Her grandchildren (from yet another children) are young and feckless – and the granddaughter Judy is in danger (!) of settling into a spinster lifestyle. Luckily, she hits an affable young man with her car, and they can get to know each other over his sickbed. And Claire and Stephen continue to write back and forth; her letters are a delight.

This sort of novel from this sort of time is so good at combining high emotion with high comedy, expecting the reader to feel sad on behalf of a tortured marriage while simultaneously laughing affectionately at witty, foolish young things falling in love. It is expected of the reader, and we deliver – or at least I did. A bit like soap operas today, we can adjust our emotions and responses to the scene in question. It helps, of course, that Ertz writes very well – only occasionally letting the melodrama get to her head with a few overwritten passages.

Above the fray, and helping everybody in the right direction, is Madame Claire herself. She is something of a benevolent dictator, loved by all and cloaking her dictatorship beneath good advice and expectant patience. Scott wrote an interesting blog post that is partly about manipulation in this novel, but I think I’m fine with it in a novel like this – which uses metonymy but never quite has the stakes of real life.

If you are a fan of Richmal Crompton, EM Delafield, or any number of Persephone authors – this will be up your street. Relaxing and fun, even when the characters are in high peril – but I think my favourite story was Judy and her hit-and-not-run victim. Maybe I’m a romantic at heart after all.

Mrs Christopher by Elizabeth Myers

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I first stumbled across Elizabeth Myers at a book fair in Sherborne. Mum and I had gone on a day out there, travelling by train, just to enjoy a mosey around. While there, we spotted a sign to a book fair – and, naturally, went to have a look. It turned out to be one of those places for book dealers and rich folk, rather than the ordinary reader. I’m not particularly interested in whether or not the book I want to read is a first edition, and I’m definitely not interested in valuable books of topography – which seemed to make up quite a chunk of the stock. After a bit of browsing, I came away with The Letters of Elizabeth Myers – which ended up being my favourite book I read that year. Though admittedly it was while I was at university as an undergraduate, and the amount of non-course reading I managed to do that year was extremely low.

I later realised that the book was probably stocked there because Myers was an author of local interest – she lived in Sherborne. In, it turned out, the house next door to a friend we visited in Sherborne (albeit many decades earlier). She was married to Littleton Powys, one of the Powys brothers – including T.F. Powys and John Cowper Powys. They share with me the honour of having been the son of the vicar of Montacute.

Myers died very young, aged only 34, but did have three novels published during her life. I’ve read the most well-known of those, A Well Full of Leaves, and I don’t remember anything about it except that I wasn’t super impressed. But #ProjectNames encouraged me to get Mrs Christopher (1946) off the shelves. The copy I have is a presentation copy signed by Myers and her husband – to somebody who was apparently trying to dramatise the novel, though I don’t think that ever happened. (I’m assuming this Nora Nicholson is not the same as the actress, but who knows.)

That’s a long build up to telling you about this book. It opens somewhat dramatically – Mrs Christopher shoots a man named Sine through the temple. He has been blackmailing her, and she has had enough. At the end of her tether, she reaches into her purse – which for some reason has a loaded pistol in it – and does the deed. But she is not alone: three other people are also in the room, all of whom have been blackmailed by Sine.

Mrs Christopher is not your typical murderess. She is a quiet and conscientious widow in her 60s, and she is keen that nobody else gets the blame for her actions – and so gives her name and address to the three strangers in the room. And then off they separately go. But Mrs Christopher knows that she will confess – and, opportunely, her son is at Scotland Yard. She goes to him and tells him what she has done.

In an effort to test the resolve of human nature (or, let’s be honest, to engineer the plot), she offers up £1500 that she has in savings to see if the three others in the room will inform against her, if a reward is offered. She thinks they won’t; her cynical son thinks they will. Either way, she has confessed and looks likely to hang – which she takes in her stride.

The remainder of the novel is divided into three distinct sections. In each one, we follow another of the blackmailed people as they leave the scene of the crime – back to their lives. Myers does an impressive job at creating each of these worlds, so that they feel complete and well developed for the 50 or so pages in which they appear. There is Edmund, determined to rescue a woman he knows from life as a prostitute; Veronica, who has run away from her husband and desperately wants a baby with the man she is living with; Giles, a doctor who does illegal abortions and has only ever been fond of his studious younger brother. Each is fully realised, with positive attributes being constantly offset by their weaknesses and hubrises. Each section leads towards the question: will they betray Mrs Christopher for the sake of £500 – which was, of course, a fortune in the 1940s.

One of the things I appreciated about it was how faith is woven in. Myers was a Christian herself, and many of the characters in Mrs Christopher are either people of faith or people seeking God. I see sympathetic or accurate depictions of faith so seldom in novels that it is always a welcome feature!

And this novel is certainly thoughtful. The writing is occasionally a like workmanlike, and there are moments that it leans towards the melodramatic, but a whole lot less than you’d imagine from a description of the opening scene. Indeed, Myers uses the premise pretty elegantly – and it’s impressive to have such distinct sections to a novel, almost a series of linked stories, without it feeling disjointed. All in all, I thought Mrs Christopher was a pretty good contribution to my names-in-titles reading project.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy Saturday, y’all. It’s another busy weekend for me – I’ll be in London today, seeing Betrayal, and potentially joining in the People’s Vote march if we can manage the timings. I’ll also be reading a great book on the train; more of that anon (or right now if you follow my Instagram). Hope you’re having a good one, and here’s a book, blog post, and link:

1.) The book – came up in the recent episode of ‘Tea or Books?’, where Rachel gave me a tour of her shelves. When I spotted Happily Ever After by Susannah Fullerton, I was rather baffled that I hadn’t heard of it before – or, more likely, heard about it and forgot. It’s a celebration of Pride and Prejudice, looking at the characters and story – but also the history of the novel’s popularity and various metamorphoses. Irresistible, no?

2.) The blog post – speaking of that episode, if you enjoyed hearing Rachel take me through her bookshelves then dive back into the Book Snob archive and see her flat for yourself. It really is lovely. If Rachel ever gives in the teaching, she could be an interior designer – bold and clever choices are all over the place, and she is rightly proud of it.

3.) The link – is a New Yorker article about a stack of books that the author’s father piled up over the decades – but it is, of course, about much more than that.

 

 

Books from Astley

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As mentioned in my Weekend Miscellany, I spent some of Saturday at Astley Book Farm – with some friends from university and their three children. It was super fun (and, let me tell you, Astley does not skimp on their cake slices). The turnover of books didn’t seem to be huge in the six months since I’d been there, and the children’s section might have been more restricted than I’d imagined (having not ventured into that section before). It was definitely still a joy to go back, and I bought four books – maybe the last books I’ll buy this year?? (But also probably not, let’s be honest.)

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof by Penelope Mortimer

I’ve been meaning to buy this distinctively titled Mortimer novel for so long, and just waiting until the moment came. And the moment was here! I do have one or two books I’ve yet to read by her on my shelves, but another can’t hurt.

The Best Books of Our Time by Asa Don Dickinson

This is an annotated list of the best books published between 1900 and 1925. I have only dipped in so far, but the list will hopefully bring loads of suggestions into my life. It is based on the votes of many people, and is just the sort of book I couldn’t leave behind. Who was Asa D D? No idea…

The Dress Doctor by Edith Head

Ms Head might be a big name I hadn’t heard about, but this non-fic book about costume design in 1940s/50s Hollywood sounded fascinating. I flicked through and saw Our Hearts Were Young and Gay mentioned, and I had to have it.

Last Boat to Folly Bridge by Eric Hiscock

I used to leave near Folly Bridge (in south Oxford) and walked across it more or less every day for two years – so the title caught my eye. It’s a memoir about publishing, so even better.

Song for a Sunday

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Spotify’s recommendations have come up trumps again. Not to be confused with ‘This Town Is Killing Me’, which I featured here a few weeks ago, here is a spectacular song by Natalie Hemby – ‘This Town Still Talks About You’. As well as being beautiful, I love the story to it – which looks at a small town remembering somebody who has left it, rather than the usual narrative from the perspective of the leaver.

 

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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You know how I’m not buying books this year, except for special trips? Well – this Saturday I’m off on one of those trips, back to Astley Book Farm. It’s not been super long since I was last there, and I don’t know how quickly they replenish their stock, so who knows what I’ll come back with. But I suspect something. And I also think this might be the second and final bookshop trip of the year! I’d planned them both last year, which is why they were the caveats.

While I’m there, I hope you’re enjoying your weekends – and here’s a book, a blog post, and link to help you do just that:

1.) The link – is an ingenious idea for an article from the Guardian. They contacted five people who won ‘lifetime supplies’ of different things, from toilet roll to chicken, and learned how this affected their lives (and what ‘lifetime supply’ means in practice). Guys, one of them is books!

2.) The book – I keep going back to WhichBook (after testing out lots of book recommendation websites) and writing down book titles and not buying them – but I was particularly intrigued by Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst. I can’t remember what I put in the sliders, but it did seem very up my street. Find out more! (Has anybody read it?)

3.) The blog post – Moira makes The Strange Case of Harriet Hall by Moray Dalton sound pretty appealing, but the main reason to visit Clothes in Books this week is those lovely pictures of 1930s clothes. Heaven!

A few more films

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I’ve been watching still more movies, and it’s fun to write a little about each of them. Not least because I never seem to remember what I’ve seen if I don’t write it down. Don’t let that put you off these films, though, because I’ve watched some really good stuff recently.

 

Lilting

I loved this moving film about a man (Ben Whishaw) whose boyfriend has died – the film sees him trying to connect with his boyfriend’s grieving mother (Cheng Pei-pei), who is Chinese and doesn’t speak much English. With the help of a translator, they try to connect (and Peter Bowles is in a supporting role!) If you speak Mandarin and English, it might be a bit annoying that every line is essentially repeated by the translator, but that was not an issue for me. A simple, beautiful, thoughtful film – and a brilliant performance by Whishaw.

Moonlight

It won the Best Film Oscar a couple of years ago – remember envelope-gate? – and I’d avoided watching it because I thought it had lots of drug-taking in it. Turns out, no. It shows three periods of one man’s life, from child to teenager to adult, as he deals with an abusive mother, his sexuality, and being bullied. If that sounds super dark, then fear not – the film is oddly lovely, even with all those elements, and that’s probably because of the way it’s shot. A worthy winner.

Paterson

I forget where I saw this recommended, but was pleased to see it on Amazon Prime. Adam Driver plays Paterson (who lives in Paterson) – a bus driver who also writes poetry. He lives with his creative, affectionate girlfriend and their dog, and the movie mostly sees him go about his ordinary, everyday life. It’s truly lovely. There are few momentous events, and those that seem momentous turn out not to be – it’s rare to see ordinary, contented people shown so well, and it’s another beautiful film to add to this list of beautiful films.

We the Animals

Speaking of, the cinematography in this film is mesmerising, and that’s not something I’d usually notice. It’s about three brothers who grow up with volatile parents in near-poverty – and about the confusion that can come about from the mix of love, angst, violence, affection, and the failure to fit in. It drags a little in places, but Raul Castillo’s performance is brilliant, and (again) the way it is shot and edited is stunning.

Isn’t it Romantic

And now a change of pace! I set aside my irritation that this title doesn’t have a question mark (why?!) to enjoy a sort of spoof rom-com that was made by Netflix. Rebel Wilson hits her head and wakes up in a world that resembles a rom-com – she lives in an enormous New York apartment, has a female nemesis at work, and Liam Hemsworth is in love with her. It’s certainly not groundbreaking, but Wilson is always very engaging to watch, and the whole thing is super fun.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

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Having surprised myself by how I loved Pigs in Heaven last year, I was keen to read more by Barbara Kingsolver. I wouldn’t have read Pigs in Heaven if it weren’t for A Century of Books, and I was glad to find it still on my shelf – as I’d got rid of a few Kingsolver novels when I moved house. Mostly because they’re usually chunksters, and take up too much room on my limited shelves. Well, I ended up kicking myself for that, didn’t I?

After asking around, I decided to give Prodigal Summer (2000) a go – and I also decided (shelf space still an issue) to listen to the audiobook, read by Kingsolver herself. I didn’t know a lot about it, except that it had multiple narratives. And that it was very many hours long.

Unlike many books with multiple narratives, these weren’t separate perspectives on the same central story. Rather, these are tales of three people living different lives in the same broad area in Virginia. It covers a single summer, transformative for each of them in different ways. They are:

  • Deanna, a woman who lives alone in the mountains, working as a park ranger, fascinated by predators. Her role is to protect the area, and she is very content without human intervention – which is, of course, exactly what she gets in the form of a passing young man…
  • Lusa (pronounced Luther) has recently moved to the area, living with her husband Cole and feeling ostracised by his extensive family. As the oldest brother, he has the most land – and Lusa is used to an urban life, where she was an entomologist.
  • Garnett, an old and widowed man whose remaining passion is cultivating chestnut trees to try to restore the lineage of the extinct American Chestnut. He has an ongoing enmity with his neighbour Nannie, who grows organic apples and hates pesticides.

It is a rich a complex novel. Each of the characters has enormous depth, including most of the many secondary characters, and Kingsolver unfolds this in a leisurely way over the course of the book. I particularly appreciated that Deanna is not a lonely spinster type, and that she loves the solitude – or, rather, the human solitude. One of my favourite moments in the book is the line that “solitude is a human presumption’, because of course she is always surrounded by any number of creatures, large and small.

Even characters who initially seem a little cartoonishly drawn, through the eyes of Lusa or Garnett, grow as Lusa and Garnett learn more about them – whether that be tragedies in Nannie’s past, or Lusa discovering more about her siblings-in-law, nephews, and nieces. I shan’t say the enormous moment that affects Lusa’s journey, but it happens very early on and sets the tone for all of her sections.

So, I loved almost anything which involved more than one (human!) character. Kingsolver is brilliant at the gradual evolving of human relationships (romantic or otherwise), and paces them wonderfully. What I didn’t love so much were scenes with only one person in – and there are a lot of them. Equally, some polemical scenes are rather overdone.

The reason for these introspective scenes is often because of biology. As you may have spotted, all three of the main characters are fascinated – even obsessed – by one element of nature. Lusa the entomologist, Garnett and his trees, Deanna and coyotes. If you are also interested in biology, then this might also fascinate you. I am profoundly uninterested in bugs, trees, or predators. Nothing in science has ever really captivated me, and biology was always bottom of the list. Kingsolver evidently shares these interests, and explores them at length, but I would have preferred more about the human interactions and less thinking about food chains or cross-pollination.

And there are some scenes where one character will elaborate to another why their biological perspective is wrong – the lack of subtlety here reminded me of Kingsolver’s lack of subtlety in The Poisonwood Bible, which had initially put me off reading anything more by her. Deanna, particularly, with her lectures on why you shouldn’t kill coyotes, really began to pall at times. It was narratively interesting to me.

On the other hand, what did work with an impressive subtlety was the interweaving of the narratives. It was very occasional, and didn’t lead to any enormous revelations or substantive changes in the direction the novel was heading, but we gradually learn about the connections between these seemingly distinct lives. It helped give greater reality to this world she’d created.

Ultimately, then, I don’t think this book is ‘for me’ in the way that Pigs in Heaven was. But I think it would be the perfect book for somebody interested in biology and novels with real human depth – and, despite its faults or elements that put me off, I’ll be thinking about those wonderfully realised characters for a long time.

 

Alice by Elizabeth Eliot

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I’m sure you know about the exciting and excellent Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press – if not, hurry to them – and today I’m going to share my post about Alice by Elizabeth Eliot. Below is the beginning of my review – you can read the rest over at Shiny New Books.

Hurrah to Dean Street Press and their continued Furrowed Middlebrow series, bringing back underrated women writers that most of us haven’t heard of before. Elizabeth Eliot certainly fits that category for me, but after reading Alice (1949), I’ll be keen to read more Eliot.

Despite being called Alice, the narrator is Margaret – she first encounters Alice when they are at boarding school together, in the late 1920s. It is immediately clear that Alice has left a significant effect on her schoolfriend, with Alice’s almost artless carefreeness showing options for a bohemian lifestyle that Margaret can’t quite aspire to.

Do book recommendation sites work?

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Let’s face it, I’m never at a loss for book recommendations. Even if I somehow got through the 1300+ books on my shelves that I haven’t read, there are enough titles that I read about on blogs, hear about on podcasts, and learn about from friends that I am never going to run dry. And yet, nonetheless, I am intrigued by the concept of book recommendation websites. Do they work? Can algorithms understand my tastes?

Well, let’s see.

I’m using the first list of sites that I came across, which is on a site called Life Hack – “10 Best Book Recommendation Sites You Need to Know“. The article isn’t dated but, as we shall see, I think it must be a little bit old. I’ll be trying each of the sites out, and where they require me to add in some books to guess my taste, I’ll be using the three listed below. (I thought it might be mean and unhelpful to pick wildly different things I’ve liked.)

  • Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker (of course)
  • I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
  • Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Let’s take the recommended recommendation sites one at a time, and see how things go.

GoodReads

This relies on you having put all your books in already. I have a GoodReads account, but I don’t use it, and I have no books listed there. Strike one.

LibraryThing

I do, however, have a LibraryThing account, and have all my books listed there! So I don’t have to put in my test three, because it’s using nearly 3000 books to recommend from. And these are the top five books it tells me I should read:

  • The Winged Horse by Pamela Frankau
  • Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh
  • The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah
  • Company Parade by Storm Jameson
  • Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym

You can even click on ‘Why?’, next to the recommendation, and it will list all the books that have made them bring up that recommendation. There were 83 reasons why for the Frankau!

These recommendations look really good, and I’ve been meaning to read more Frankau and try Jameson. I’m less sure about the Hannah, but the Marsh and Pym would be great. And they’ve listed 1,999 recommendations for me! (#1999, in case you’re wondering, is A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys, which is way too long.) You can even remove all authors that you already have books by – then I get 786, from Sophie Hannah to Katherine White.

I’m off to a very strong start with LibraryThing.

What Should I Read Next?

Points for clarity in the name. You can only add one title, it seems, and they didn’t have Miss Hargreaves in their database. I was able to add it via ISBN, but then got this screen:

Ok, let’s try I Capture the Castle instead. Yep, more luck here – and this is the top five:

  • The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
  • Good Wives by Louisa M. Alcott
  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
  • Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
  • The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Ah. This is where the strength of LibraryThing’s hand becomes clear. Because WhatShouldIReadNext.com can’t tell that I already own all these books, and have read four of them (Good Wives is tbr). On the plus side, I love the Gibbons, Bronte, and Mitford. I really didn’t like The Woman in White, but 3/4 ain’t bad.

I got 14 recommendations in total, and none of them are particularly adventurous or out of the ordinary. The most unusual is probably Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (which I’ve also read and loved). Oh, wait, except Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan and PJ Lynch, which I’ve never heard of, and is tagged ‘frontier and pioneer life’, ‘stepmothers’, ‘mail order brides’…

Bookish

Hmm. The website still exists, but they don’t seem to have any recommendation function any longer. I guess they changed their purpose?

Shelfari

This just plain doesn’t exist. It’s merged with GoodReads.

Amazon

Ok, sure. Now, this will give me some recommendations based on my purchases (the first five are Furrowed Middlebrow publications, four of which I already have) – but, to return to my initial aim, let’s see what they recommend alongside Miss Hargreaves.

Unsurprisingly, since it was a Bloomsbury Group reprint, they’ve picked three others – Henrietta’s War and Henrietta Sees It Through by Joyce Dennys and The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson. Equally unsurprisingly, I already have them all.

When I look up I Capture the Castle, I am recommended… two other editions of I Capture the Castle, but also:

  • Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
  • How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
  • Looking for JJ by Anne Cassidy

We’ve already covered the Gibbons. I’ve heard the Rosoff recommended glowingly before, but the Cassidy seems a bit of a curve ball. Does I Capture the Castle really scream “would love a book about child murder”?

BookBub

This isn’t an enter-a-title-and-get-a-recommendation site; rather, it’s a newsletter that gears towards cheap books. I took a several-step questionnaire where I said what sort of books I was into. Having done all that, though, they did come up with some suggestions (that made me want to instantly unsubscribe). Here are the first five:

  • 17th Suspect by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
  • Witchnapped in Westerham by Dionne Lister
  • Murder in the South of France by Susan Kiernan-Lewis
  • Killer Cupcakes by Leighann Dobbs
  • The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer

I wouldn’t dream of reading any of these. The worst one yet.

Olmenta

This one isn’t personalised, it’s just a list of books they think you might like. Though how they’re deciding that when they don’t know anything about me is anyone’s guess. Let’s see what they say under ‘fiction’…

  • Simon vs The Homosapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
  • Conor by Joseph Edward Denham
  • The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
  • The Fold by Peter Clines
  • A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

I haven’t heard of three of these, so I like that it’s out of the ordinary. But, having clicked on the middle three, I have no wish to read them. Why so many child-killing books out there?? I do want to read more Kate Atkinson, though, so thanks for the reminder. There’s a good mix of genres/periods/authors, and I had to get to the 48th recommendation before I came to a book I’d already read (The Stranger by Albert Camus).

WhichBook

Oo, fun! This one is based on slider scales of emotions and types of content – as below. So I can’t put in my favourite titles, but I can try to match my mood. You can only do four sliders at a time – you can see what I chose in the screenshot.

So, what did it choose? Here are the first five:

  • Scenes from the Life of a Best-Selling Author by Michael Kruger
  • Natural Novel by Georgi Gospodinov
  • Fear and Trembling by Amelie Northomb
  • The Character of Rain by Amelie Northomb
  • Some New Ambush by Carys Davies

It sorts in ‘Best matches’, ‘Good matches’, ‘Fair matches’ etc. I had no ‘Best matches’, and only the first of these was a ‘Good match’, so apparently my combination of requests is unusual. But, onwards – I haven’t heard of any of these authors or books, and I love what an unusual selection it is. I’ve added Natural Novel to my wishlist, and I can see these sliders becoming super addictive.

Riffle

You have to sign up, but you can add categories you like, the book you’re currently reading (Noah’s Ark by Barbara Trapido), and three favourites. There are various other options – find good local bookshops, etc. – but what did it end up recommending?

Well, it does recommendations per book, rather than collectively. Some of these are a little uninspired (all of the recommendations related to Noah’s Ark were other novels by Barbara Trapido), but here’s what it had to suggest for Miss Hargreaves:

  • London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins
  • The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson
  • The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books by Martin Edwards
  • The Box of Delights by John Masefield
  • The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood

We’ve established that I love Ferguson, and I’ve been happily dipping in and out of the Edwards for a long time. My podcast co-host Rachel loves Norman Collins, so I was pleased to see that come up – and I haven’t heard of the Wood.

Conclusions

As I said, I’m unlikely to need to throw myself on the mercy of book recommendation sites – but it’s been fun to see what options are out there! Of this mixed list, I can certainly see myself exploring the LibraryThing recommendations list more often – but the one I’m most likely to return to is WhichBook. I love the idea of those sliders, and it brought up such intriguing and unusual titles that I’d be very unlikely to come across them otherwise. And it’s easily the most fun!

Let me know if you go delving into any of these sites – I’d love to know what you come up with.