Curl Up With a Good Book

Maybe you have a little extra time on your hands during January - but no desire to clean out your drawers or go out into the frigid air. Now's your chance to catch up on reading, just for fun.

In case you aren't sure what to read, the library has some selections on display in the new seating area (where the Interlibrary Loan office used to be). Students enrolled in the "Books and Culture" course have made some selections of books they recommend. And we have a section for the armchair traveler - books set in foreign locales for those of us who didn't get to go abroad this J-term.

You can also browse our displays of books for diversity and on China as part of the Global Insight program. And if you still haven't found the book that grabs you, try one of these tools.

• Fiction Finder (on campus only) - this database groups books by similarity. Choose it from the right-hand side options of Books in Print.
• Gnooks - try either Gnod's suggestions or the literature map to find writers whose work is like other writers
• LibraryThing - a site where over half a million people have cataloged their books - 32 million of them. You can search by "tags" - user-generated subject terms - to find books you might be interested in.
• Lit Lists - links to "best of" lists of all kinds.
• Novelist (on campus or use your barcode and last name to access) - includes recommended reading and author read-alikes.
• OCLC Fiction Finder - an experimental catalog of fiction that you can search or browse by topic.
• Whichbook - put in your preferences on sliding scales, get lists of books to match.
• Writers Read - a blog where writers recommend books they're reading.