Readers' Advisory

Finding Books to Read 

Reader2

What this site is:

* Social list of books - share your reading experience with other people.
* Recommendation system - find new books to read in the categories of your interest.
* Folksonomy - everybody can use his/her own keywords to categorize books.
* Faceted classification - predefined types of keywords for authors, reading statuses.
* Friend finder - easy discover people with similar reading tastes.
* Virtual community - discuss books and authors with other readers.
* Exportable and trackable - via RSS feeds and JavaScript snippets.

FictionFinder

FictionFinder provides a work-based approach to fiction. You can search by place (New Orleans, for example); by character (Nancy Drew), and more. When you find an item you are interested in, you can then learn whether your library has it.

StoryCode

Every time you finish a book, tell us all about it.
Our questions will code your experience of the story.
Our system finds matches and makes recommendations.
Books found through StoryCode will surprise and delight you.

Debbie's Idea

Long before the Internet was commonly available, Debbie had the idea that it would be useful to have a reference work suggesting which book of an unfamiliar author would be best to read first.
Start reading an author with a poor or atypical example of his work, she observed, and you would likely never read that writer again-perhaps losing in the process a world of pleasure and knowledge.
On the other hand, since there would seldom be one right book to read first, the resource would have to be a compendium of opinions.

Fun stuff for readers 

Reading Group Guides

A great resource, this site has discussion questions for popular book selections as well as helpful advice on starting and running a book club.

Classic Novels in 5 Minutes a Day!

Classic Novels In 5 Minutes A Day brings you the world's best classic novels, delivered in daily five-minute installments to your e-mail.
Free!

First Lines: A Sort of Literacy Test

We have collected here the first lines of books we hope you will recognize as old acquaintances. Your challenge is to name the book given the first line. The books are divided into categories which may help you identify them.
Have fun!

Discovering Dickens

Stanford University has this excellent project where they are republishing 19th century novels in facsimiles of the original serialized form. You can get either newsprint copies sent to your house or PDFs to your email every week--either one is free!

VidLit

This is really cool. Authors read excerpts from their work and the VidLit people do Flash animation to go with it. It's hard to explain, just go look at it!

Booklists 

Lists of recommended books on a particular topic or in a particular style

Fiction-L Booklists

Themed booklists and readalikes compiled by the members of Fiction-L, a listserv for librarians interested in fiction and Readers' Advisory

Time Travel Via One's Own Thread of Consciousness

This list includes stories about people who travel through time along their own thread of consciousness. Typically, this means their future self "possesses", if you will, their past self and relives a scene.

Novels with footnotes or indexes

One of my favorite literary devices

What book can't you put down?

Ask Metafilter is a site where people can post questions and get advice from other members. Here's a great thread about good reads.

The Invisible Library

The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.

Libraries with great RA programs 

Williamsburg Regional Library Bookweb

Check out the online form for personalized book recommendations.

Morton Grove Public Library's Webrary

They have great RA services and also host the Fiction-L archives.

Seattle Public Library

SPL pioneered the "One City, One Book" program and has a lot of great community reading activities.

Discussion 

Weblogs, forums, online magazines and more

Bookslut

An online magazine with book reviews, author interviews, and columns about books.

Chicklit: for women who love words

Forum for women to discuss books; not just "Chick Lit" but any kind of literature.

Book Standard News

The Book Standard is the one-stop online information center that provides Nielsen BookScan-powered charts, book-market analysis, news, reviews, commentary, job boards, plus extensive database resources: nothing less than the measure of all things book.