Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Hmm. I put in Jonathan Lethem’s Gun with Occasional Music and I got Alice Munro out the other end (along with the Zen Brain or some such). Odd.

Time to try out The Story of O.

After more than a dozen damn “Unfortunately we currently have no recommendations for the books you have entered,” returns, I came to the conclusion that my choice of romance reading material is evidently abnormal, atypical and highly obscure.

And won’t Jenny Crusie, Jane Heller and SEP be pleased to hear that? 

I finally hit upon something apparently less vague for their picky database with Michael Crichton’s autobiographical, nonfiction book, Travels. And it returned non other than Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Oookay…I guess I must have missed the chapter where Crichton visits Gondor.

*snicker*

Oh, my.  They definitely need a wider database.  I tried a Laura Kinsale, and it came back with a recommendation for Danielle Steel.  That’s just… There are no words.

StoryCode.com does the same thing much better, I think.

I have to second the storycode.com recommendation - it’s teh awesome.

And if they come up with ‘no recommendations’ for Virgnia Kantra, there is something very wrong.

Possibly something very wrong with the entire universe.

Based on the notes here, I just tried storycode.com.  I input Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (which I’ve recently finished and adored) and it came back with Small Island by Andrea Levy.  Haven’t heard of that one, but the other things on the list that I’ve read were a good match for Lion as respects tone and characterization.  So, yay, looks like I’ve got a new toy :).  Oh, it also listed a Patricia Gaffney book - I’ve never read anything by her so can’t say if that was a good match or not - but I found that an interesting selection.

Eek.. I put in Montana Sky by Nora Roberts and got Linda Howard and Jayne Ann Krentz.

No Way!!!

Makes you wonder if there’s a romance bias (input any romance, get back any random romance; they’re all the same, anyway)?

Now I gotta go play with this thing . . .

Interesting!  I’ll have to check out this and some of the other suggested book recommenders; I haven’t had a good one since Alexandria Digital Literature stopped being supported.

Hmmm, I didn’t have much success either. Perhaps I’ll try storycode.com just for fun.

I’d like to put in Thieves Bounty, by Laine Morgan.  For a first book, its excellent, the descriptions are fresh, the plot is fresh, and her heroine is kick ass. I’m looking for Ms. Morgan to become one of the stars of romance in the very near future.  Her book is available through http://www.newconceptspublishing.com