More Books You May Enjoy

The Internet is a place of diverse and endless subjects. Anyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the past decade knows that the Internet is also a place of diverse and endless advertisements. Sometimes they are in-your-face banners, and sometimes they appear in the form of the slightly more inconspicuous product recommendation. My emails to friends often contain wide and strange assortments of subjects and I've always enjoyed the website recommendations that Gmail suggests for me by picking up keywords in my correspondence. A few years ago while I was in school, I wrote a post about the interesting assessment that YouTube made of me based on its video suggestions. Amusing as the assortment was, I think that considering the selection of videos on YouTube a person would have to display incredibly suspicious viewing habits to be red-flagged. But the other day, I was presented with perhaps the most troubling product recommendation I've seen to date, and it came from Chapters.

I absolutely love Chapters and, even more, I love ordering books from the Chapters website. This is probably because I enjoying receiving mail so much. It truly is a dying practice. So, I occasionally receive emails from Chapters regarding promotions or certain books, and a section of "More books you may enjoy" is included at the bottom. More often than not, the books listed there are books by authors I've searched and it's common that they're books I've already read, so it's not the most useful tool for me. This particular email's recommendation maintains that uselessness, but I cannot figure out what triggered the selection of these three books and, more importantly, these three subjects:

Diet & Weight Loss, Self-Help, and Christianity. Plus, there's a horse on the cover of the middle book! (We all know how I feel about horses.) I thought Chapters knew me better than this. If I was asked to list the Top Three subjects that I'm least interested in reading about, I would probably spout these off without even thinking. "Clowns" and "Ventriloquism" would round out the Top Five. What is Chapters trying to tell me? Does it think I need to diversify? Is it judging me? Mocking me? Honestly, I'm kind of scared.

A Promise for the Near Future

Last weekend, I boldly proclaimed that this would be the week I started blogging again. This post is a small offering to that person to say "I remember making that bold proclamation, and, despite my procrastination thus far, I still intend to start blogging again."

I'll include this little anecdote from my day to spice this baby up a bit.

Today was a day of shopping. A long day of shopping. A long day of shopping in which I did not make any purchases. This is clearly problematic. Instead, I helped Ryan pick a new phone (a Blackberry, pff) and some small game shot (because I know so much about shooting birds). On the drive home, Ryan asked if I could "fish around for a beer" for him while he made a fire in the wood stove. He then spouted off this little gem, which he proudly told me he'd just come up with:

"Have you ever gone fishing for beer? It's the best kind of fishing; you always catch a buzz."

He thinks he's very funny. After chuckling to himself, he told me I should "tweet that." So welcome back to my life, readers. I'll be talking to you again very soon!