I’ve had an awesome run with amazon book recommendations lately. Sooner or later I guess they’ll recommend something I don’t like, but since I started paying attention to them recently, I haven’t been steered wrong.

Specifically, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Life of Pi have all been really great amazon recommendations. Next up is The Secret Life of Bees, which really doesn’t grab me from the blurb, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt at this point.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time grabbed me, I suppose, for the same reason I go out of my way to think about the literal interpretation of signs on office windows. I certainly wouldn’t consider myself anywhere close to autistic, but I guess it helps to see even just a little of yourself in a novel’s main character.

The Time Traveller’s Wife sucked me in pretty completely, to the point where I found the two main characters invading my thoughts all day long. I don’t know if other people get that, but it was pretty unusual for me, so I’ll put it down to really good characterisation, and the story being non-linear enough that it needed some thinking about. I also loved the time travel model it presented which somehow seems so much more satisfying than the whole ‘parallel universes’ thing.

And finally, Life of Pi, which I just finished reading tonight. The twist is still trying to work out exactly how to resolve itself with the rest of my world view. I honestly I never saw it coming, and to be honest, didn’t comprehend it until I’d read the line three or four times. I guess I’ll console myself in having picked the twist in The Village from just seeing the trailer.

Anyway, it’s really odd that all three of these books, recommended by Amazon, appealed to me so completely, but for very different reasons. Normally I expect these sorts of recommendation engines to just recommend something very similar to what you rated highly in the past, so I’m really quite impressed here. You know, if they open up an Australian store some day, I might even buy something from them.