I hate it when people ask me inane questions such as “What’s your favourite book?” And “Who’s your favourite author?” To start with, people actually still read books? Real paper and ink books, not online ones? Who knew!

No, we kid. We know people who still read books. Okay, we still read books. In spite of the Internet taking over the world, even those of us obsessed with finding the next killer start-up, website, web tool or can’t-live-without app have to step away from the glare of our computer screens every now and again.

The problem is, being able to Google absolutely anything and everything, down to our own mothers’ names, means that we, okay I, have lost the ability to remember anything. Which means that when people, especially cute people (read ‘guys who I’m trying to impress with my immense intellect and quirky reading tastes’), ask me the above questions I’m often struck dumb. I know I’ve read a lot of books. (Really, I have.) I know I enjoyed a lot of them. I just don’t know any of their names. I can remember what they were about, I can even remember some of the character names, but mostly, for the life of me, I just can’t remember the title or author.

Thank goodness I remember Google, at least. And by ‘Google’ I mean the Internet at large. Because thanks to a bunch of literary genius websites I can now sound as intelligent as I know I am. Somewhere inside me. Deep inside.

First port of call when trying to remember the name of a book or author would have to be Google. Naturally. Google Book Search, specifically their Advanced Search Page allows you to type in a character name, a line of dialogue or any other obscure memory of the book you’re searching for and comes up with surprisingly accurate results.

A couple of other websites good at (book)worming titles and authors out of thin air are:

BookFinder: you can search over 150 million new, old, rare and out of print books by typing in keywords.

Askville: a search service from Amazon where one can ask and get answers in discussion boards centred specifically around books. Just type in your memory of the book and no doubt someone, someone with a better memory than you, will come back with a title and/or author.

Yahoo Answers, is said to be growing by 11 million new answers per month – that’s a lot of answers, works similarly, as do Answerbag and Answers.

Once you’ve found out the names and authors of books you once loved, you can then go to WhatShouldIReadNext? for recommendations on similar books. Enter a book you like and the site will analyse a database of real readers’ favourite books to suggest what you could read next.

Or you can just use all these sites to pretend you’re well read. Not that that’s something I’d do myself, of course.

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