NoveList is a website curated by librarians about books and is a great place to explore genres to find new titles you might not have heard of before and to find read-alike books (ex. If you love Game of Thrones, you might like these authors).
*Please note that not every title you find on NoveList will be available in Westfield or through the CW MARS catalog. You can always request us to find it elsewhere for you from another library through interlibrary loan, or to request that Westfield add it to their collection through this online form.
Books that have a “Find this title at a CW MARS library” link underneath the book cover will bring up the CW MARS catalog so you can instantly put a request on a book you’re interested in.
Get Started
You can access NoveList through our Online Resources page on our website. There are two different links to NoveList: one for using NoveList through our public access computers, and one for you to access from home. From home, you would need your library card number to login.
There is a lot of information on the NoveList main page, but don’t let that deter you. We’ll be focusing on just a few features in this introduction.
Recommended Reading Lists
On the left hand side of the screen, there is a large set of lists. You can filter these easily by age range at the top, and also into fiction or nonfiction. These lists are curated by the librarians who work at NoveList, so they’re a great place to start.
There are lists based on genre (ex. Classics, Fantasy, Horror), media types (ex. Audiobooks, Graphic Novels), Best Of lists, and also NoveList’s most popular featured list For Fans Of…
Each of these lists is broken down further when you click on them. Reading these smaller pop-up list titles will give you some idea of the types of books that will be on them. You can find something that strikes your fancy and sounds interesting and click on it to bring up a small book list.
Once you choose a smaller list, using the dropdown menu at the top, you can choose to display as “Brief” which will give you the optional link underneath the title to search for the book through the CW MARS catalog.
The most fun list is the For Fans Of… list. The smaller lists under this heading are updated frequently as pop culture shifts and changes. Right now, there are options for fans of Bridgerton, The Last of Us, Ted Lasso, Outlander and more.
If you click on these lists, it will give you new and exciting book titles that you might like if you enjoyed the title material. Once again, if you want to be able to search through CW MARS for the titles, you can use the dropdown menu at the top to choose to display as “Brief” which will give you the optional link underneath to the CW MARS catalog.
Browse by Genre
If you scroll down the main screen a bit, you will see a few icons at the bottom under Browse by Genre. You first choose an age range, and then it will bring up a long page of genres alphabetically presented. You can skim through the covers of a few of each genre, hovering over the covers to get a small snippet of information about the book.
If you want to see more of a genre, you can hit the “Explore Genre” button. This will bring you to another page that breaks down the genre even further so you can find a book that will entice you. Each page offers more links to click through and will provide you with a list to browse. Once again, it will show a link where you can see if the title is available through CW MARS so you can see if it’s at your local library, or so that you can put a hold request on it.
Keyword Search
Like many sites, NoveList comes with a search function. Say you read a great book and decide that you want to find more books like it. Maybe you don’t want to just read the same author over and over again, so you can type the title into the search bar on NoveList.
For an example, I’ll type in The Nightingale which is by Kristina Hannah. You can now do one of two things to find other titles like this book.
First, you can click on the link under the summary called Title Read-alikes. This will bring you to a page that lists titles and the reason why they were chosen as similar titles. This page is great for printing, but not so great for searching from the list within NoveList or CW MARS.
Second, from the search screen, you click on the title of the book. This will bring up the title page that every book on NoveList has. This screen will then have some Read-alike titles on the right hand side which are clickable. Clicking one of these will bring you to that book’s title page and so on. I find this method the most fun because you never know what you’ll find or where you’ll end up!
Wrapping Up
I hope you enjoyed this very brief tutorial on NoveList. There are so many other ways to use the site, but this is good to get you started. It’s quite fun, almost like you’re browsing around your local library, except from the comfort of your own home.
If you want to learn more, keep an eye out for more NoveList tutorials as we dive into more specific aspects of the resource.
Happy book hunting!
