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Just back from a wonderful, but all too short, stay at the Booklovers' Bed and Breakfast in Lyme Regis, on the South coast of England. Run by Bob and Mariko Speer (Bob pictured right), the three room bed and breakfast is perched on the top two floors of the Sanctuary Bookstore - a booklover's paradise where antique books jostle for space with the not so antique but often exotic and sometimes rare. From travel and topography to mysticism and religion by way of a generous helping of novels, thrillers, mysteries, sci-fi and much more, The Sanctuary has it all, including a popular section devoted to the most requested authors - a wonderful section in which to pick up a long lost favorite. Downstairs is a bargain basement where all books are £1 or less. And when you've had your fill of books, you can start on the bountiful collection of prints and original works of art - many of which are stored in the downstairs loo, which makes for a convenient seat while browsing the racks.
"When we want a book exactly like the one we just finished reading, what we really want is to recreate that pleasurable experience--the headlong rush to the last page, the falling into a character's life, the deeper understanding we've gotten of a place or a time, or the feeling of reading words that are put together in a way that causes us to look at the world differently. We need to start thinking about what it is about a book that draws us in, rather than what the book is about."
—Nancy Pearl, on The Four Doors to Reading
Readers often ask us how BookBrowse's Read-Alikes are selected. Companies like Netflix, Amazon, and GoodReads use complex algorithms to generate recommendations, so I think lots of readers assume we do, too. Our method is a lot less high-tech (actually, no-tech), and far more personal: we pick them by hand. But what criteria do we use to select them? When we read about librarian Nancy Pearl's Four Doors to Reading (also known as the Rule of Four), we realized she was pretty much describing how we think about our Read-Alikes. Pearl asserts that "all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction are broadly made up of four experiential elements: story, character, setting, and language." She refers to these elements as doorways, some of them larger or smaller depending on the dominant element of each book:
I received an email recently from Ken which read, "I am looking for a book, or biography, or a life experience narrative that speaks to an older male, lives alone, has no health issues, widower. There seem to be plenty of books out there written by and for women, but would like to know how other men have traveled this road?"
If you're intrigued by the success of E.L. James's "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy (currently at #1, 2 and 3 in the NY Times bestseller lists), you might be interested in this Publishers Weekly article which puts the series into the context of the wider book market:
When I was browsing in our local independent bookstore recently I happened to see a weighty edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women on the shelf in the children's classics section, and I grabbed it. It's on my list of parenting imperatives, of books I absolutely must read my daughters, and since Poppy is almost ten, I figure it's high time for Little Women.
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