One place I like to visit for book recommendations is Library Thing, an online community of 900,000 readers. These are people that not only own the titles, but have taken the time to enter them into the system and label them with different subjects to make them easy to find and share. It's fun to see which books appear the most often on people's bookshelves. Here's a quick look at four topics at the time I wrote this post (click on the topics for the full, current list):
Crafts:
- Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook by Debbie Stoller
- Stitch 'N Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker by Debbie Stoller
- Stitch 'N Bitch Nation by Debbie Stoller
Knitting:
- Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook by Debbie Stoller
- Knitting Without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmerman
- Stitch 'N Bitch Nation by Debbie Stoller
Quilting:
- Quilter's Complete Guide by Marianne Fons
- Heirloom Machine Quilting by Harriet Hargrave
- Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!! by Diane McClun
Beading:
- Creative Bead Weaving by Carol Wilcox Wells
- The Art & Elegance of Beadweaving by Carol Wilcox Wells
- The Beader's Guide to Color by Margie Deeb
Practice Makes Perfect
It's not a perfect system. Since people can use their own subject tags, you'll find different books listed under variations. For example, "quilt" will pull up different results than "quilting." Even so, it gives you a good idea of who the popular authors are in various
categories.
There are also some reader reviews, although I've found that Amazon tends to collect more reader reviews than Library Thing.
If You Liked This . . .
The other fun thing to do on this website is to look up a favorite book to see who owns it and what other books they would recommend. This is the kind of thing I do all the time with my friends—"If you liked X, you'd probably like Y." The connections aren't always obvious, so this really helps me find books I might never have sought out. For example, I put in Wire Style by Denise Peck and one of the recommended titles is Semiprecious Salvage by Stephanie Lee. Try it and let me know what you think. Do you agree with the recommendations?