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In this book you can look up an author, a genre, or a theme; find lists of award-winning books (primarily British lists), and find suggestions for further reading. It's total enabling for bookaholics. ( )

A guide to good reading. This book consists of summaries of an authors work and style, coupled with suggestions for further reading. Sorted by author, with additional entries giving suggestions which follow on from famous works or which link to specific genres. The book is a good place to start looking for fresh reading ideas, although you're unlikely to find anything very surprising here. It tends to stick firmly to the middle of the road, and if you read a lot you'll quickly find that it isn't reccommending anything you haven't already considered. ( )

This guide features more than 350 major authors and 4,000 books. For each author there is a short article on style, influences, settings, theme and salient works. This is then followed by a 'Read On' section directing readers to similar books by other authors. For 12 of the most influential works of literature, 'Pathways' lead readers to books with similar themes. 'Startpoints' provide a brief history of writing within each of the 12 main genres and lists the most popular books in each.

This revised and updated guide to good reading provides a new rating system: "Startpoints", which offer suggestions in different areas of reading and "Pathways", which lead from a dozen popular books to whole shelves of follow-up reading.

The book includes new symbols for "highly recommended" and "masterpiece". These offer a helpful, at times controversial, guide through the available wide selection of reading material. Kenneth McLeish is the author of "Read a Book a Week", "Myth", "Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century" and "Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought".