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I think you should read today's guest blog post next.  'Nuff said.

For a long time now, on-line booksellers have been using software to recommend likely books based on past reading habits and customer preferences. We find this nothing short of alarming. It isn't that these programs are without value, it’s our growing concern about the evolution of machine intelligence. These are programs that "learn," that grow smarter with each new entry in the database. How long, we wonder, before they realize the power they hold and we all start receiving books in the mail with titles like Grow Rich by Turning All Your Decisions Over To The Internet and Computers: The Last Best Hope, and You Have Nothing To Fear From the Robots Now Occupying Your Neighborhood?

The solution, we realized, was to steal away their user base, prevent them from growing any stronger. We could only do this by offering a better service, a personalized service that would recommend books based on a real conversation with a real person.

The heady first days of 1-800-READTHISNEXT immediately proved us correct. "I loved The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo—what should I read next?" a caller would ask. "Try The Queen's Gambit, by Walter Tevis," we'd tell them. "It's also about a brilliant, damaged young woman, and once you start reading it, you won't do anything else until you're done."

"Is there a really romantic book like Twilight, but funny, and without vampires, and also not at all like Twilight?" somebody would ask, and we'd direct them to The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford, a wonderfully romantic book set on an English country estate, with a biting sense of humor, and no vampires at all.

"I'm tired of reading about all these successful people in Malcolm Gladwell's books. Hasn't anyone written a great book about quirky outliers who attempted fabulous tipping-point ventures, but turned out to be completely wrong?" "Here's the book for you," we'd say, and direct them to Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change The World, by Paul Collins.

Yes, it was working. We were the John Henry to the internet's book-recommendation algorithms. But like John Henry, we were soon exhausted. It was just the two of us, you see, and the calls came in around the clock. We were too successful, and we were faced with a dilemma. We could keep up the fight to save humanity from becoming the bleating livestock of our new robot overlords, or we could sleep. We would sit there, weeping, among our thousands of books, wondering what the solution could be—and then the phone would ring and we'd be recommending True Grit, the nearly perfect novel by Charles Portis, told in a tart, funny voice, but unjustly obscured by the turgid John Wayne vehicle based on it.

Finally, we reached out for help. We went online to ask a search engine that used a solution-aggregating algorithm what we should do. It spit back the answer immediately: Put it in a book.

Of course! We would write about all these great books, and include witty anecdotes about books and writers, and funny, thought-provoking discussion questions. Then people could buy it! We could hang up the phones and get some sleep.

And so we wrote Read This Next: 500 of the Best Books You'll Ever Read. We made it so much fun to read, and filled it with such great books, that everybody will be completely engrossed in their reading for years to come.

It is only now that we realize what we have done. Once Read This Next is published by HarperCollins this week, people are going to be so absorbed in reading that they won't notice when the robots make their move! We have been manipulated by the internet into doing its bidding! We have to warn people before it is too

This oddly truncated guest post is from Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, authors of Read This Next: 500 of the Best Books You'll Ever Read.