Books – that is exactly how they work. Picture evidently stolen from demotivation.us, although I have no idea where they got it from in the first place. 

I am a little preoccupied right now, as an old friend reminded me that there exists a web service called Goodreads. It lets you list the books you own or have read, and rate them. If you rate 20 of them, it will recommend more. Actually Amazon.com does this already for me, and is very good at it, so I am not sure there is anything for me to win by this. And I don’t expect to have more than the occasional stray book in common with people I know, so even though a couple of them are on Goodreads, that is not helpful either.

What I really wold like was the books equivalent of OKCupid. On that site (which is mostly for dating, these days) you answer questions and the robots come up with people who match you to some degree. If Goodreads could come up with people who had even a remotely similar taste in books (like 2 out of 10 books in common, if any such person is alive on Earth), that would be extremely interesting.

So right now I do this kind of manually. I start with my most recent books and work backward, at least in the beginning. And after I write my review of the book, I look at the reviews of the people who have the same book. If they say something interesting, or if they have more than one book in common with me, that would interest me. But I have found no such people yet. Although there are a few who have many Happy Science books, but that is probably because they are Happy Scientists.

In any case, remembering my recent books and trying to say something meaningful about them is interesting, but also time consuming. It competes directly with my blog time.

Feel free to visit my Goodreads page! (Or http://www.goodreads.com/itlandm )

Or make your own and send me. Although I probably won’t like your books, and you probably won’t like mine. Humans are individuals, and so am I. ^_^ It is good we are not just bricks in the wall!