RECOMMENDING BOOKS BASED ON RANDOM WIKIPEDIA ENTRIES

Hello everyone! I really wanted to do a recommendation post, but couldn’t think of something to theme it on. Then I came up with this idea.

So if you don’t know, Wikipedia has the ability to generate a random article. Which obviously, can be on absolutely anything. So I decided today to base my recommendations on random wikipedia articles I generated. I made it a rule that no matter what five came up, I had to use them, so this was quite a challenge for me.

I’ve generate five articles to recommend a book based off of, so let’s get into it.

1: 1998 FIBA Africa Under-18 Championship

This is an annual basketball event held in Africa. Unfortunately, I haven’t read any books about basketball, but I have read some sport books in general, which I used for these prompt.

I ultimately recommend RUNNING WITH LIONS by Julian Winters. This is a book about soccer, following a under 18s team at summer camp. There is also an important championship match in this book. There is a diverse cast and found family tropes. This book is a lot of fun and has an m/m friends to enemies to lovers romance as the central relationship.

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2: Atrial Branches of Coronary Arteries

The atrial branch of coronary arteries deliver blood to the heart. I decided to choose a book that deals with the heart as an organ/in a medical sense (rather than say, romantic)

For this wikipedia entry I am recommending TIN HEART by Shivan Plozza. Tin Heart is an Australian young adult contemporary novel. The main character is the recipient of a heart donation that saves her life. The book deals with Marlowe’s desire to contact her donor’s family, even though they don’t want to meet her, and discusses living with congenital heart disease as a young person. This is a really unique YA novel and I think a lot of people would really enjoy it for it’s complex main character and original premise.

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3: Magatama

Magatama (勾玉, less frequently 曲玉) are curved, comma-shaped beads that appeared in prehistoric Japan from the Final Jōmon period through the Kofun period, approximately ca. 1000 BCE to the sixth century CE.

This was a hard prompt for me to recommend off. I don’t have any books about prehistoric Japan, magatama or curved, comma-shaped beads. In the end, I chose THE SWORD OF KAIGEN for this prompt. This is a military fantasy based on historical Japan. I chose it for it’s historical elements and it’s Japanese setting. This is a really unique fantasy, it has elemental magic and the main character is a mother, which is something so rare but appreciated in adult fantasy. The rarity some elements of this book kind of match the rarity of magatama ???

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4: School Life (2019 film)

School Life (French: La Vie scolaire) is a 2019 French critically acclaimed award winning teen comedy drama film. It follows a group of teenagers disillusioned by a world that seems to have turned it’s back on them.

It is unfortunate I have no YA contemporary books set in France for this one. There are a lot of YA contemporaries that could fit with a group of teenagers feeling disillusioned with the world. Utimately though, I decided to go with one that has a teen comedy vibe like this movie and choose HERETICS ANONYMOUS by Katie Henry. This is about a group of teenagers at a catholic school who feel the administration doesn’t care about them and has turned their back on them. It has a large cast who start carrying out pranks to point out the hypocrisy of their school and to be honest, the world, and it’s really funny.

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5: Kennet and Avon Canal

The Kennet and Avon Canal is a waterway in southern England with an overall length of 87 miles (140 km), made up of two lengths of navigable river linked by a canal. 

For this, I decided to continue on with the idea of waterways and canals and recommend DART by Alice Oswald. Dart is a longform poem, told from multiple perspectives, all of which relate to the river Dart in England. The river, ferryman, water nixies, dead man and more speak to narrate the story of the river and its importance in English countryside. Kennet and Avon Canal is an important waterway, and similarly, Dart talks about the importance of that river in England historically, it’s current state, and the future of the river.

This was A LOT harder than I expected. It took me literally weeks to write this post because I had to think about each entry that came up for so long. But it was also super fun and I hope you enjoyed reading this post and my recommendations. I would love to hear what you would have recommended for each of these wikiedpia entries

until next time!