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NYPL #ReadersUnite campaign wants to know what you’re reading

The New York Public Library wants to know what spellbinding novel, useful self-help tome, riveting history or mesmerizing biography has you in thrall.

The library’s latest social media campaign on Twitter and Facebook – #ReadersUnite – started at 10 a.m. Tuesday and generated more than 2,000 tweets within two hours.

Marketers and publishers swiftly piled on to the hashtag promoting their own products, but lots of people shared their current passions, from wonky political treatises and text books to best selling potboilers.

@whitfrazier announced he was reading Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning,” which, he said, was a “good book for the current political moment” with an “interesting literary cut-up approach.” @meg_medina was engrossed by Susan Faludi’s new book “In the Darkroom” because “humans come 2 identity via so many difficult paths.”

More than 70 library systems across the country and several authors have said they will participate, according to the NYPL. Global events in the preceding year, “highlighted how important it is to share ideas and information freely,” Christopher Platt, the Library’s chief branch officer, said in a statement. “One of the ways we can do that,” he continued, “is to share what we’re reading.”