NPR Book Concierge 2020

One of my favorite resources each year is the NPR Book Concierge. It came out yesterday but I was busy presenting so I saved it for today!

The basics of the Book Concierge is that the NPR staff pick 383 books that are "best" by a variety of metrics and turns them into an app that allows you to mix and match based off of natural language as well as genre. 

Here is an example of some of the categories you can use to filter out a list of books that are what you are looking for:

I have included pictures of the top navigation banner which gives you access to all of the years the Book Concierge has been around and the first part of the side navigation bar. Please click through to actually navigate it all. But as it says, there are over 2,500 best option here, options that can be narrowed down by enough categories to satisfy any reader, not matter how picky. And you can easily overlay these filters so that you can find a book "for art lovers," about "identity and culture," that is good for book clubs. Yes there is an option that fits all of those categories.

This is my favorite best list because of that ease of use combined with the backlist potential. Remember, a book is still "best" even if it didn't come out this year. Stop worrying about which year it was best. Readers don't care as much as we think, they just want to know someone thought it was a good read.

But this is also my favorite because of those filters and the way any reader can take the list and make it give them a highly specific and expertly tailored suggestion. For that reason it is also my go-to resource all year long for my most difficult and picky patrons. When you give patrons access to the Book Concierge, for all of the years, they get to steer the ship to find their own suggestion. You are simply giving them a pre-approved universe of books to start their search with. Then they can be as picky as they want, choosing their own filters to narrow it down. And since these lists are VERY broad in terms of the types of books that are included each year, the results are very useful.

So visit the NPR Book Concierge now and have fun using it for yourself or your patrons, but don't forget about it all year long. It is a wonderful go-to resource and now, after years in existence, the compound interest of titles makes it even more useful.