The Genre Blender

Megan M. McArdle is a librarian who writes the Science Fiction and Fantasy column for the prestigious print magazine called Library Journal.

I recently discovered she is also the proprietor of a website dedicated to promoting mixed-genre books. It’s called Genrify: Where Genres Mix and Mingle (www.genrify.com).

I visited Genrify the other day. I discovered posts about literary books that employ fantasy, a micro-genre called portal fantasy, and mystery & urban fantasy series that have relationships which take several books to develop.

I also discovered a link to another of Megan McArdle’s projects called Genre Blender (blender.genrify.com).

In a nutshell, Genre Blender a site where you can choose what genres you’d like to combine and get a list of books that fall in to those categories.

Here is how it works: Genre Blender is a webpage with seven colorful buttons, each with a genre name, and instructions to click on any two or three genre buttons. Then you click on the blend button.

So in this example I clicked on the “Horror” and “Fantasy” buttons. Then I clicked on the blue “Blend!” button.

What I got was a list of books with elements of both genres.

It’s fantastic. I spent an entire morning playing with this database and writing down dozens of book suggestions.

If you like mixed genre novels — urban fantasy, science fantasy, paranormal romance, and so many other possibilities that don’t have their own distinctive name — then you must check out Genre Blender.

Heck, if you’re only interested in what books could possibly show up when you blend “Historical” and “Science Fiction” genres, go to Genre Blender and find out.

As I was getting ready to publish this post, I discovered that Megan M. McArdle recently published an introduction to Genre Blender. It’s great and worth reading.

It explained a few things that had me baffled — such as why some genre tags above the book descriptions are capitalized while others are lowercase.

Check out About the Blender and get ready to cram more books into your reading list.

2 comments on “The Genre Blender

  1. You’re welcome.

    Let me know if visiting her Blender has doubled your to-read list like it did mine!

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