There are so many ways to recommend books — tell me your favorite book or author, favorite genre, a topic of interest, astrological sign, favorite color, pairing books and food or drinks, geographical regions. Recommenders get creative and will go as wild as readers are willing to venture. It was with great delight that I read an article about librarians in Portland, Orgeon who are recommending books based on their patrons’ tattoos. How fun is that?
Show the librarian a tattoo, or tweet them a photo, and they will match a book to your tat. They have gotten a great response. It’s no wonder. What a fun way to suggest a book and find a potentially new favorite read. I would totally do it if my library tried it out.
I don’t recall ever having given or received a book recommendation in any especially creative way. The closest I got was a year’s subscription to the New York Review of Books Classics. They send you one book a month and I liked them all. I actually have three more to read from that subscription but I am confident I will like them. I would do it again but in order to avoid the accumulation of unread books, I will not allow myself another year until I finish the first one. And it has been a couple years now that I have been promising myself to read those final books. They are actually on my reading table that has found some extra library books on it recently and has Bookman cracking jokes about load bearing capacities as I admonish him not to bump the table for fear of a bookslide that might bury one of the cats.
Clearly I have no problem finding books to read but something like the Portland librarians are doing could provide an opportunity for a reader to take a chance on something outside their usual choices. What about you? Have you been the recipient of some creative book recommendations? Or perhaps you have been on the suggesting side of the equation? Do tell!
I have spent 23 years recommending books to my daughter, and she has read every single thing I’ve suggested. Now I am helping her move in to start grad school in English at UNC Chapel Hill!
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Jeanne, does your daughter make recommendations to you too with equal success?
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using Tattoos to recommend books is such a unique and funny idea.
I also do not receive recommendations in any sort of creative way 😦
Personally I usually just send people emails of a review or blog post when I think that someone will be interested in a book.
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Brian Joseph, I don’t usually suggest books to people I know though sometimes when I am talking about what I am reading they will think it sounds good enough to try themselves. My husband used to work at a bookstore and loved making suggestions and was really good at it. He’d have customers come back looking for him every month or two for a new suggestion. I always envied him that!
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What a cool way to recommend books!
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Adele, isn’t it neat? Very creative.
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In my first bookstore job, I was asked for a recommendation for short stories shortly after I started working there and I suggested Timothy Findley’s collection, Dinner Along the Amazon, but the customer asked me why I enjoyed it so much and I simply couldn’t think of the words and just kept saying he was a really good writer. Which of course he is, but I hadn’t yet learned how to articulate that for some other reader who hadn’t already fallen in love with a book! That took awhile for sure. Does Bookman miss the bookstore work?
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buriedinprint, heh, it does take practice to be able to say why you like a book doesn’t it? Yes, Bookman misses bookstore work. He was at B&N and the stores have changed so much he is kind of glad he isn’t there any longer. He got to have fun at the peak and got out just as they were starting to slide. He is in eye wear now but he still talks to his customers about books and reading and gives them recommendations! 😀
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Hah! That seems like the perfect “career progression” in so many ways. *squints at screen*
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I jut tell people “read this” and I keep asking them about it and if they like it! 9 times out of 10 they really do like it! Word out mouth works wonders and giving them the book so they don’t have to go out and find it! Like right now I am reading Ajax Minor’s book Sun Valley, Moon Mountains, it’s very good so READ IT! See it’s that easy!
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Annie, ha! You crack me up! 😀
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I’ve had a couple of friends ask me for full-on book recommendation lists, and mostly what I do (this is embarrassing) is go batshit hyperdrive on them and write down fifty books I’ve loved over the past five to ten years. It’s kind of a Jackson Pollock approach to book recommendations (THROW EVERYTHING, SOME OF IT WILL STICK), but when I worked in a bookshop I always asked what the last book they’d enjoyed reading was and work from there. It’s a far cry from cool tattoo-based recs, though!
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Elle, that’s hilarious! I think you should trademark your Jackson Pollock Method 🙂 I usually freeze up and become unable to think of any book title at all even one I am currently in the middle of! If I am given time I then fret over whether or not the books I suggest are ones the person will like. I’m just a mess!
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That is a great way to recommend a book. It definitely gives the library experience a new spin! The only thing I’ve seen at an indie bookstore one time was that they had a bunch of books wrapped in and you would pick one at random. It was touted as a blind book date 🙂
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Iliana, it certainly is different. We had an indie bookstore here too do the blind date thing for Valentine’s Day. I didn’t give it a try but it is definitely creative!
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Haha I love it Stefanie. Am not surprised this idea has come from Portland. What a cool place that city is.
I’m wracking my brains for interesting recommendation approaches I’ve used or been the recipient of but can’t think of anything particularly out of the ordinary. I am often attracted to 5, or whatever number, books on a topic, particularly if the topic is a favourite of mine or intrigues me. I like reading those lists and I like concocting them. But if people ask me off the cuff for a book on X my mind usually goes blank.
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The tattoo idea is great and I guess it really would work. I am nervous about recommending books because I hate a glazed look from someone who didn’t like the much as much as I did!
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Oh yes, that glazed look! But, do you ever find yourself trying very hard to not do it back in the reverse circumstance?
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I’m very sure I’ve done it too – nobody’s perfect!
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No, but we’re oh so humble!!
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Ian, oh that glazed look! I have seen it and fear it too!
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whipseringgums, Minneapolis is always in competition with Seattle and Portland it seems for various things. We had better up out game here! 🙂 Five not ten, huh? Yes, i can see the appeal. It offers enough for choice but not so many that it become too much and feels unmanageable. I have the same problem with off the cuff recommendations! Sometimes I can’t even remember titles of the books I am currently in the middle of!
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Oh good, and you still so young! There’s hope for me and my memory yet!
Five, ten, what’s in a number? When it comes to book lists you have to stop somewhere – it’s all arbitrary in the end isn’t it!
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If I get a recommendation, it’s from the women in my bookgroup, who are rarely wrong and who thrust a book into my hands and say “read this!”. It’s usually a book they’ve just read themselves (e.g. on set in India, or, oddly enough, a Debbie Macomber), but still.
I write book reviews, that get pushed through to Facebook. My mother once complained about these, so I told her to ignore them as I wasnt going to stop writing them because she didnt know how to scroll past them. Then 3 months later she went “read any good books recently?”. Mutters: read the posts you’ve bitched about and find out……
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Nordie, oh your mom is priceless! It sounds like something my mom would do! Nice you have trusted book groupies thrusting books upon you!
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I think my main recommendation strategy is to wait for people to express litrally any level of interest in getting book ideas, and then bombarding them with an insane number of book recs until they beg me to stop.
You know. The usual.
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Jenny, ha! I used to do that but hesitate to make any recommendation these days because the look of fear in people’s eyes as I begin to go on and on about this book and that book and oh this one too got to be too much for me. Maybe I should just close my eyes while telling people about books?
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I usually freeze up and have to go back over my reading lists–embarrassing, to be sure.
And I wish I were a patron of that library!
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Carolyn, I know! I am tempted to tweet them just for a recommendation even though I am nowhere near Portland! I have had those frozen moments too! The ones where I suddenly can’t even remember the titles or authors of the books I am currently reading, not even the one I have in my bag at that very moment!
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Recommendation based on tattoos….super cool! BTW I thought you were making progress on the reducing the load on the reading table! My guess is as you read some, you also added some! 😉
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cirtnecce, there has been no progress on reducing the load on the reading table. Just when I think I might be able to give the poor thing some relief I pile one more books!
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