Anything but Jeffrey Archer!

You know how it is: you’ve enjoyed a book, you didn’t really want it to end, and you’d like to read another one just like it. Or… you struggled through that brick-sized saga with a gruelling plot and not many jokes, and all you want now is a bit of light relief. Help is at hand

Larger than life ... or down to earth?

Whichbook is a bit of fun, really infuriating, jolly useful or a waste of bandwidth, depending on how you approach it. The "about" says that "Whichbook gives readers an enjoyable and intuitive way to find books to match their mood."

I think its real task is to provoke you into thinking about what you actually want to read, whether or not it’s on their suggestions list.

The way it works is that you select any four of twelve bars which have opposing attributes on them. So you can use the "happy-sad" bar by clicking "happy" or "sad", and so on. It isn’t made very clear, but after four it stops accepting your clicks – you have to start the search at this point.

I asked it to find me a happy, unpredictable, short book with a bit of sex in it. The eight suggestions included novels, poetry and a book of short stories. Along with reader reviews, there was a feature which should have been really clever, but wasn’t quite.

By hitting a button marked "Borrow", you should be taken to the catalogue of the library service of your choice, to check whether they’ve got the book. Somewhere along the line, I got a "page cannot be displayed" message rather than the Westminster catalogue. I’m sure it’s just a temporary blip.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "Books". Whichbook is under "Choosing books".)

Testing trivia

As you will know by now, we at Treasure Hunt Towers tend to be intensely serious about more or less everything, including books and literature. But we recognise that not everyone can reach our high standards of seriousness, so here’s something completely trivial.

FunTrivia Literature has quizzes on every aspect of the written word. Novels, poetry, plays, sci fi and manga – all these and lots more are given the pop quiz treatment. Some of them are ridiculously easy and some are really quite hard.

They warn you about the level of difficulty, and the joy of this site is that you can always pick the book you read last or have engraved on your brain from A-levels, to make sure you get a good score.

Modesty forbids me from revealing the rather good score I achieved on The Importance of Being Earnest, and shame prevents me telling you just how much I’ve forgotten about The Tempest.

Good fun, though.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "Books". FunTrivia Literature is under "Fun stuff".)