Are you looking for a good book to read this summer? Have you run out of books by your favorite author or need a new series? Try StoryGraph! StoryGraph is both an app on your phone and a website (https://thestorygraph.com) that you can access from a computer. It is free to join; you need an email, username, and password to sign up. It allows you to track your reading, search for books, compare books, and write and read detailed reviews.
StoryGraph has a variety of tags for books including "mood" related tags such as "funny", "tense", "mysterious", "romantic", and "lighthearted". These are in addition to the traditional genre classifications. The "mood" designations alongside rating categories such as "plot or character driven", "strong character development", "loveable characters", "diverse characters", and a section to rate the books as fast, medium, or slow-paced, allows the app to make great recommendations and let you understand yourself better as a reader. Maybe you like mysteries but only if they have strong character development and are medium paced, or maybe you want to skip the character development and get right to the plot. Each book has percentages based on how many people tagged it with a certain tag. These percentages make it easier to compare different books. If you're looking for a book similar to the one you just read where 88% of people thought this mystery was "mysterious", but for this other suggested title, more people stated it was "dark" than "mysterious", this will help narrow your search for another good book. The more people that tag or review a book, the more detailed the recommendations become. Even if you don't have the time to write a review of a book you read, you can take time to check off the moods and categories you feel the book and its characters fall into. This will help other readers understand whether the book is a good fit for them!
You can use these terms to search for books as well such as "lighthearted mystery fast-paced" or "funny romantic novel" to bring up specific results that use the tags you find yourself enjoying. To start off, you can input some of your favorite books to give the site an understanding of your reading style, or search your favorite books to see what tags were used.
StoryGraph also has user-added content warnings which can help you avoid certain themes and situations such as violence or death of a parent. The warnings are in three sections: graphic (the most content), moderate (some content), and minor (very little content). There's also book challenges so you can give yourself goals for number of books, number of pages, or number of hours (for audiobooks) to read over the year. You can also choose different editions of books, specifying audiobooks, e-books, paperbacks, and hardcovers. At the end of the year, StoryGraph gives you a break down of the books you've read along with graphs of different sections such as genres and which formats you read/listened to the most. If StoryGraph doesn't have a book you're reading you can always add the book, and the website takes you through each step of adding a book. This way, you help expand StoryGraph's selection.
Remember to log your books in Beanstack for our summer reading challenge! Sign up for our summer reading if you haven't already, all ages are welcome.
- Charlie Loftus, Librarian Trainee, Riverfront Branch