Novelist

Book Recommendations and Read-Alikes

Have you found that you have read all of Brad Thor’s books but you want to read something similar?

Which side note – good job! That is some excellent reading you’ve done!

But back to the craving you need to sate – more Brad Thor-like books. Allegheny County Libraries and NoveList Plus can help! We can feed that need!

All you need to do is go to the County eLibrary and click the Go! button on NoveList Plus to get started. Once you put in your library barcode you will be able to search by author, Brad Thor (obviously), or even title, “Black Ice” (just an example I get it if you are more of a “Rising Tiger” fan) and then you can get read-alikes for either!

No judgement seriously some of us are just bigger Black Ice fans.

You can even just search using keywords to find a book on a topic if you wish… although why you aren’t searching for more Brad Thor read-alikes is a little confusing to me.

You can also browse genres if you want more thrillers and suspense books!

The moral of the story here is that the Allegheny County Libraries and NoveList Plus have your Brad Thor book needs covered but if you need more than just Brad Thor books we can also help there. If you run into any issues with library databases please reach out to you local librarians to help!

-Adrianne, Northland Public Library

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Struggling with Youth Readers’ Advisory?

If youth books aren’t your thing, but you have young patrons and caregivers asking for reading recommendations, try Novalist k-8. They have a great section on working with youth – including programming ideas, readers’ advisory tips, and how to match books to your patrons!

Gabi B. Robinson Library

Continue ReadingStruggling with Youth Readers’ Advisory?

Need help looking for a book?

As library staff, we are often asked to find a book someone read a few years ago or as a child. During the interview process, usually some information is gathered about plot, characters, location/setting…but we lack the title. In comes NoveList! I’ve used this resource many times to successfully locate the title and author for the patron.

NoveList

Here you or a patron can enter in search terms and narrow down criteria for the book. For this patron, she had read a vampire romance YA book (that wasn’t Twilight). Under Advanced search we can enter in keywords and select the age group.

Once we brought up the results, you can further narrow down the results by selecting publication date range.

Narrowing down the results gave us a much smaller list to look over and looking at the book covers, we were able to successfully locate the book!

There is also a hand link to check the catalog!

A successful book hunt all thanks to NoveList!

Gabi B. – Robinson Library

Continue ReadingNeed help looking for a book?

What’s Next?

Nothing is better than finding a good book and finding out it’s a series to keep it going. However, it is not always clear what title to start with or which title comes next.

The Kent District Library, in Kent County, Michigan, created the What’s Next: Books in Series Database to help search series. They define a series as two or more books linked by character(s), settings, or other common traits. The database is searchable by author last name, author first name, name of a series, book title, category or genre. It is the perfect resource if you need a printed list of titles.

Fantastic Fiction is also a great resource for keeping up with your favorite authors and series. When searching an author, you can see all their series in order and all their titles that are not a part of a series. A unique feature of Fantastic Fiction is series that are not tied by author, for example the various Star Wars and Star Trek series. 

Of course, there is the Novelist Plus database! Like the others, Novelist provides author’s series, but a feature that makes Novelist stand out is the Read-alikes specifically for series!

Happy reading!

Leigha Lamont @ Wilkinsburg Public Library & Eastridge Branch

Continue ReadingWhat’s Next?