Sometimes if you don’t remember the title or author of a book, you can still find it by searching on the name of a character or a fictional city, but how do you find a book again if you only remember the plot?
Allreaders.com has the answer: a search engine that allows you to find books within the genre of your choice by plot, main character, main adversary, setting or style, or even just do a one-click search for the more common plots within that genre.
I tested it out, with a book obscure enough that I wasn’t expecting it to be in the list in the first place: Marge Piercy’s He, She and It
Also there, though, were 99 other books with female scientist protagonists in their 20s or 30s. Some I’ve read, some I haven’t. I don’t often need to look up a book I’ve forgotten, but being able to browse books by key features is a fantastic thing, too. I can see using this search engine as a tool to supplement my reading wish list for a long time to come.
