In his book Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), Vladimir Propp reduced the Russian folk tale to its smallest narrative units, or narratemes. He then characterized a tale as having 31 functions, and seven character types.

Pandora, a product of the Music Genome Project, is an automated music recommendation and internet radio service. Listeners select a song and Pandora provides a selection of similar songs, based on an inventory of 400 “musical attributes” and a further 2,000 “focus traits”.

As far as I know there is no such service for books, although Amazon will tell you that people who bought Book A also bought Book B, Book C and Book D.

Yesterday I typed my 1999 book The Pornographer’s Poem into Amazon.com and learned that people who bought TPP also bought my 1997 book American Whiskey Bar, along with Marty Beckerman’s Generation S.L.U.T: A Brutal Feel-up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolscent Populace, Darcey Steinke’s Suicide Blonde, Jonathan Safron Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel and Alex O’Loughlin’s DVD Moonlight – The Complete Series. I typed the same into Amazon.ca and what should come up but Charles Bukowski’s Post Office: A Novel, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Jackson Tippett McCrae’s Katzenjammer: Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Tempted as I am to draw conclusions, I know it could all change tomorrow.