Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month’s readers’ queries.
What’s this Firefox browser that I’ve been reading about recently? Is it any good, and is it worth taking a look at?
I’ve been playing with Firefox for a few weeks now, and within five minutes of downloading it I was completely hooked. It’s a far superior browser to Internet Explorer – it’s a smaller download, it runs more quickly, it’s not susceptible to annoying pop-up adverts, it supports tabbed browsing (which means that you can open a number of windows within the browser, rather than opening up countless new versions of it) and there are a great many utilities that you can get for it which make it even more powerful. As you can tell, I’m now a firm advocate of it, and you can read a fuller review of it on my own website at (www.philb.com/firefox.htm) or if you can’t wait, go directly to www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ to read more about it and download a copy.
Sometimes I have discussions with our users about books they’ve read, and often they want suggestions for similar novels from other writers. I can come up with a few based on my own knowledge, but sometimes I get a bit stumped. What can you suggest on the internet to help me recommend authors?
There’s a handy little website that you can try called Gnooks (www.gnooks.com/). It offers a literature map, a forum, place to buy books, and suggestions on authors. Simply type in three authors that you enjoy reading, and the system will suggest another one for you. There is also a very nifty map of authors. Type in one of your favourites and you’ll see others suggested for you – the closer they are on the screen, the more similar they are. It’s great fun, highly addictive and very useful when you want to try out someone new.
Suggestions
After my Q&A column in the November issue, I was contacted by two people with some suggestions. Another crossword-solving utility is Amo’s online crossword puzzle dictionary (www.amo.qc.ca/cgi-bin/pub/ODico/dico.out) although it seems to be a little short on words, only finding results about two thirds of the time apparently.
On the question of sequels, Collecting Books and Magazines (www.collectingbooksandmagazines.com/) provides a useful list of sequels for children’s books, and though it’s Australian it does have many UK authors.
There’s also a new book coming out shortly called
Children’s Series Fiction published by New Chalet Club (www.newchaletclub.co.uk).
Thanks to both Adrian and Sally respectively for those.
Site of the month
My site of the month is Opening Hooks (http://openinghooks.us), a collection of literary beginnings. It does exactly what you might imagine – it gives you a list of excellent opening lines to books that draw you in and encourage you to read the rest of the novel. It is still quite small, but you can add your own favourites to their database. I was pleased to see my all-time favourite, from Iain Banks’s The Crow Road, was already there – ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded’. Another wonderful way to spend time, so if you’ve nothing better to do over the Christmas holiday take a look. On that note, may I wish you all a Happy Christmas and Happy New Year.
Updated: 29 November 2004