I've been reading more contemporary novels and works recently, mainly because it appears that the mainstream publishing industry is finally releasing its grip on the past and allowing newer more diverse writers to come out in the open. 

This does not mean you should go with the usual canon (old white men), but rather you should branch out to other places for books you wouldn't normally consider. For example, I'm pretty sure I'm completely over Hemingway and some other writers taught to me in the halls of school. 

I could go into the many ways that finding something new actually requires you to dismiss many algorithms as well as the usual suspects in terms of bookstores (what does the staff think? it's not always that great or diverse). What you have to do is discover by mistake and by reading out of your comfort zone. 

To that end I am glad I took a risk on Singer's early novel, The Certificate. It's a perfect novel for our times, more so than anything based in the Nazi/WWII era. This one is based in Warsaw in 1922 and shows how tumultuous times with a million gods can tear humanity apart. 

Absolutely amazed. 

And the only reason I found it is because I was going to Warsaw and searched that word on my library site. If you search "Warsaw" on Google, you get some basic facts, travel guides and references to WWII (of course). On Amazon a bunch of movies of the same. If you add the qualifier "books", then you get something better, but still mainly focused on the idea of Warsaw in the time of WWII and its horrible aftermath. 

Nothing like this book that I managed to find, of course. 

So go out and read it. *stamps foot*

That being said, I'm sure if you went deep into the google or amazon page you'll find this book, but that's the point. It's hardly on the same level of serendipity as something like the library or a bookstore (some bookstores). What's most popular may make some $$ but it doesn't mean it's what grows knowledge in any meaningful way (see our current crisis for where this kind of thinking leads us). 

Even on the amazon product page for the Certificate book the "customers liked" is just a bunch of other Singer books which is true, algorithmically speaking, but not in terms of humanely.

Discovery is still a hard but to crack, but for the moneymakers of the world, it matters not.

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