Week Four, Assignment One:
Goodreads

After establishing a Goodreads account and making friends with colleagues, "recommend a title to a colleague based on a title or titles that they have enjoyed using the comments field on Goodreads.  Be sure to include appeal characteristics in your recommendation and note why it is similar to the title or titles they enjoyed."

Having been a Goodreads customer for nearly three years, and on LibraryThing before that, this assignment was a relative piece du gâteau. For me, the hardest part, like in a previous assignment, was determining who would be the Lucky Colleague who'd get to receive a recommendation.

Again, this proved harder than I thought.

At first I didn't want to chose anyone I knew too well already, thinking it would be more like a "real" RA experience with a random library customer.  But then I found the colleagues I don't know well tend to have tastes that I don't really relate to.  I probably should have stuck with this method, to flex my RA muscles (i.e., the muscle some refer to as a "brain"), but decided since time was valuable, I'd go down a path of less resistance.

So I narrowed my list to people I thought I knew.

Man, some of you people read weird stuff!  Just kidding.  But I also found, though surveying selectively, that many people either have so recently established their Goodreads accounts that they simply didn't have enough books listed that I had much to go on.  Another cause seems to be the combined pressures of a full-time job, maybe school on the side, and children or other family obligations that take away from your Goodreads time. 

After spending too much time selecting, I chose Marlene K. and sent her the following recommendation:

"Based on the many (who knew were that many?) books you've rated on art, art history, and art related crime (not to mention your apparent love of good narrative non-fiction), I can heartily recommend Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo's 2009 work, Provenance (it's also a mutual friend's favorite book). It tells the story of John Drewe, who commissioned an artist-acquaintance to paint 'in the style of' several modern painters, and sold them after intricately-fabricated provenances had been created and museum archives compromised. I can guarantee you will be delighted with this book."



The basic subject matter seems to be an interest of Marlene's, and it has a lot of the same appeal factors she mentions in reviews of not only art and art-crime books, but others as well, such as character and a facile writing style.  Both the main "criminals" -- John Drewe, the mastermind/con-man, and John Myatt, his artist and conspirator, though he is as much a victim as anyone in the book -- and the police who (eventually) investigate and solve the crimes, are fully realized, as are the more minor characters.  I really believe Marlene will love this book, and I hope she lets me know so!

Impressions of Goodreads:  Despite having been a "member" of the Goodreads community for a decent amount of time, this was really my first time being more interactive with it.  I was able to easily find Marlene's page, sort her 199 books by ratings (so that the ones she liked best came first) or by author (I wanted to make sure she hadn't read and rated what I was about the recommend).  I could read her reviews, all grouped together, recommend a book to her and then go back and find my recommendation to copy-and-paste it here.  The interface mostly works well, though there is so much opportunity to manipulate the info that some times the method of doing so can be cumbersome -- but mostly it's not. 

I've long enjoyed adding my reads and reporting on them through Facebook, but now I see how easy it is to use as a Readers' Advisory tool.