A perfect confluence of events …

The events:

1. A few years ago, MT thought it would be fun to be a Nielsen family, so they came and put their supremely annoying box in and part of the deal was we accumulated points for just about every little thing: using it, service and support calls, etc.  We could redeem these points for any number of items whenever we wanted to, but we never did, and when our time came due to hand in the box (blessed day that was), we had not only accumulated a bucket load of points, but they’d changed the redemption so you got your pick of a zillion store-based gift cards.  None of which were useful to us except Bunnings (home improvement store) and Amazon (the only bookstore in the list, dammit).  So I ended up with a 300 dollar credit with Amazon, and we have another hundred with Bunnings.

2. Late last year, LibraryThing released a new recommendations algorithm.  Normally I’m not much interested in recommendation algorithms, but LibraryThing has nothing to gain from theirs (unlike Amazon and other retail vendors), and they generally are quite earnest in their desire to create honestly useful features.  When my recommendations were generated, I had a couple of thousand titles, aggregated but also broken down by genre.

3. After all the rush, rush, rush of getting caught up at work, things have slowed down and I have some time on my hands.  Which I decided to use by weeding out all the ‘are you kidding me?’ recommendations from my LibraryThing lists.

4. The two-week Easter holidays start next week.

5. I’m going to be sitting around a lot over this break, while people tear parts of my house up and put it back together again.

So, I have decided to give LibraryThing’s new recommendation engine a thorough try.  I have been going through the genre lists and ditching the obvious titles (bodice rippers are always going to be a no-go for me, as are cookbooks), but also earnestly checking out any titles I think I might like.  I used part of my Amazon credit to buy 12 of them, 6 of which arrived over the weekend.

The two cozy titles, while they did show up on my recommendations, were gimme titles, since I’ve already read books from those series and liked them.  Same with Sinister Booksellers of Bath.  The other three are new to me authors.  5 of the remaining yet-to-be-shipped 6 are also new to me authors.  Big leap, but it’s all funny money.

I’ve also reserved another 11 from my local library – 5 of which are ready to be picked up, and I checked out another 3 digitally, with another 4 on hold through my other libraries via Libby.

With the time I’m going to have in the next two weeks, I’m going to test drive all these titles and see where I stand, and how much I can rely on LibraryThing to help me find new titles.  Might be a complete bust, or there might be some genuinely interesting new books waiting to be discovered.  Likely, a bit from column A and a bit from column B.

Should be an interesting two weeks!