Reading Trails is the brainchild and coding work of our friend and colleague Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, along with his pal Nick Romeo. The two bibliophiles wanted a community reading and sharing site with something different than anything they’d found, so they built their own.

A reading trail is a set of books linked in an interesting way—it might be a journey through the underworld of crime thrillers, a tour of the books that influenced Milan Kundera, a professor’s introduction to French existentialism, or anything else you can think of, serious or whimsical.

Unique to Reading Trails, these trails intersect: you can find new books to read by skipping from trail to trail — from organizing theme to organizing theme. It’s like browsing at the library, except that next to every book on the shelf are other books by the same author, and from the same period, and with the same mythological characters, and that your favorite author was also influenced by, and with whatever other shared characteristics readers have chosen to highlight as they create their trails.

To create their vision, Nathaniel and Nick called in logo and icon design from our frequent collaborator Penelope Dullaghan, gathered structural and programming advice from lead Utopian.net developers, and incubated the project through the design and build phases at Utopian.net Labs.

We’re happy to see Reading Trails fly off into the world, and we hope you’ll stop by their site, or check out the Reading Trails Facebook group, for more info or to join up with this close-knit and cultivated group of passionate readers.