Make your best reading year yet. Sign up for the Book of the Day email , and you'll get a daily book recommendation email delivered to your inbox each morning. Find book recommendations here. This is an update of a previous post by Sharon Rickson. It can be tough to remember the title and author of a book you read a long time agoβeven if it was a book that was really important to you. Fiction is cataloged by author and title, not by subject or plot line, which makes identifying books by just their storyline difficult.
Readers often ask librarians for help finding these kinds of books. First, pin down everything you can remember about the book, plot, character names, time period in which the book may have been published, genre, etc. All these details are clues in identifying the title and author of the book. Online resources can help with your search for a half-remembered book, even if all you have is a basic plot line. Searching yourself is a good place to start; then, you can post to a listserv or discussion forum, where someone might recognize it.
Or, last but not least, leave a comment on this post! Try Google! You can also try googling one key detail you remember from a book.
A Goodreads group with searchable discussion posts and thousands of questions and answers. Search archives of past questions, answered by an intense book-ish community, or subscribe and post a new one. Especially good for science fiction and fantasy. Big Book Search If you can only remember what the cover looks like, try this cover-search tool.
Books in Print. The New York Times databases. NoveList and NoveList K-8 in-library use only. If you can remember just one word, use the search function on Goodreads or Library Thing to find long lists of titles with a particular word. For recently published books, the reviews in Booklist Online are broken down by detailed genre. Sometimes, it's just not going to happen, and you can't find that elusive book you've been searching for.
