Day 35: Story Finder

I was talking with someone at Twitter today and mentioned how I want to do something like Sharon Elswit's Story Finder books, which reminded me to write something about that here. She's done a series of these books: The Jewish Story Finder, The Latin American Story Finder, The East Asian Story Finder, and The Caribbean Story Finder. 

I think these are such useful books, but I would like to take a somewhat different approach, focusing on public domain sources where possible. At the same time, I always want to promote some wonderful old books too, ones that people can easily get on the cheap in used copies, like the marvelous books by Harold Courlander. I am such a fan of Terrapin's Pot of Sense, with lots of cheap used copies at AbeBooks for example.

So, as I am accumulating the story summaries at Diigo, the best of those will eventually end up in my own "story finder" ... eventually. I'll be at 1500 by the end of the summer and by the time we reach next summer when I actually start contemplating books, whoo-hoo, I should have plenty of summaries ready to go to create my own African/African American/Caribbean Story Finder book, and for free too (Elswit's books are kind of pricey).