Posted by Dani Crickman

Yesterday, Scholastic launched You Are What You Read, a social networking site for readers. Users can log in using their information from their choice of a handful other popular networking sites, create a profile that includes all their favorite books, and find other readers with similar tastes. The site also asks users to create a “bookprint”—a list of five books that have had the most impact on their lives. (This particular user, for one, may never be able to complete her bookprint, because, wow, that’s tough to narrow down.)

Not surprisingly, a number of books by Jewish authors are popping up as frequent favorites: Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl have all made an appearance on the “most liked” list.

In my cursory exploration, I’ve found the Pass It On feature, which lets you keep track of the books you’ve shared with others, and the Books Around The World Map, which allows you to see what books are being read where, most intriguing of all the site’s offerings. While the celebrity endorsement seems a bit heavy-handed, I must admit I kind of like finding out which books shaped the lives of household names like Whoopi Goldberg, Daniel Radcliffe, and Bill Gates. It satisfies my voyeuristic urges in a way that’s much more genuinely interesting than the celebrity scoop I’m used to having forced upon me.

All in all, the site looks like a fun place for us book people to play around. If we can pull our heads out of the books long enough to make use of it, anyway.