Remember that book you read when you were a kid. You know—it had that character and all of those pages. The cover was cool and so was the ending. You just can’t remember the title. Or the author’s name. Or the characters’ names. Dang it.

What are you supposed to do when you can’t remember some (or any) details of a beloved book?

• Crowdsource it. Ask about the book on a social media platform like Goodreads or Reddit. Maybe someone will remember something.
• Ask a librarian. Walk into your library and boldly ask a librarian. They have nothing better to do than listen. Seriously, it’s their job. And they’re really smart people.
• Go to the experts. There are even websites dedicated to this very thing. Name That Book and Stump The Bookseller are two well-known options. Big Book Search also lets you search by the book’s cover. I’ve also heard that Google is good.
• Search an online catalog. Sources like BookFinder and World Cat were made for this. Even Amazon and the Library of Congress’s website can provide some insights.

There’s still sometimes that book you can’t quite recall. You can’t think of any concrete pieces of the book—just the way it made you feel. Perhaps it’s just something you dreamed long ago, but the memory is so vivid and real that you can feel it. This inability to place your finger on the right book is like having a popcorn kernel stuck in your teeth—nagging and persistent, and frustrating.

Maybe it will come to you one day, and maybe not. Sometimes, the beautiful, unbesmirthed memory of a book is better than the book itself. Reading a book is far more than just the words on a page—it’s the experience we had at that moment in our lives as we read. And that’s an impossible thing to recreate twice. The best we can hope for is to make new and equally beautiful memories.