Social media (goodreads/tiktok/reddit)? Colleagues? Friends? Browsing the library/bookstore? Asking for recommendations from staff at libraries/bookstores?
BONUS: if you can remember, how did you find books you really enjoyed?
I realized a lot of my favorite book recs came from reddit. I was a subscriber of r/books and picked up some really good books there. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is an example.
generally from friends recs, goodreads, but lately I’ve been having fun just checking the “tiny free library” in my neighborhood and taking whatever interests me. Read a few books that I never would’ve picked up otherwise that way.
Honestly? I peruse the shelves at my local indie place. Not the most effective but it supports indies and the owners now know me and what I enjoy and help out.
For enjoyment, I’ll get recommendations from my hairstylist, believe it or not! Or I let Goodreads think for me sometimes. Other times, for work, it just depends on where my academic research leads - in the former case, kind of hit or miss, but of course for my job, whatever I end up reading is obviously going to be in my wheelhouse/relevant to my interests, anyway, so those are rarely intolerable!
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Harry Potter was on my brother’s shelf. I read it because he liked it, and he hated reading. I love(d) reading, and I figured if he liked it it must be good. And an obsession was born, lol.
But I also typically just browse until a synopsis hooks me. I’m very guilty of judging books by their cover, too, so I often won’t even pick up a book if I don’t like the cover/title.
I realize you are asking books and not necessarily audiobooks but for audiobooks I follow a few good narrators that I know only do books I will like. This way I am almost always guaranteed a good book, and as a bonus I already know the narration quality will be perfect.
That’s a good method, I hate it when I find a new book I think I’ll be interested in and listen only to find that I can’t stand the narrator
Just because you couldn’t sit through Infinite Jest read by Gilbert Gottfried doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t
Searching around book stores (e.g. National Book Store, Booksale, Fully Booked, and other physical book outlets), Goodreads (including lists, and even checking reviews by S. Craig Zahler and Cardinal West), YouTube channels like Cardinal West, Jesse the Reader, etc., TV Tropes, and the occasional Reddit post and Telegram chat. I once even searched around my school’s library.
Along with what others have said, I consult the list of Noble and Pulitzer prize winners. Not all of them are great, as to be expected, but many of the best books I’ve ever read are on them.
- r/suggestmeabook and r/TrueLit (I usually search old posts);
- unread books from authors I already enjoy;
- references in books, annotations and reviews;
- some authors that, when you focus on them (which is the hard part, as the mind learns to ignore things it has no time for at the moment, and there’s never enough time for everything), have actually been mentioned quite a bit alongside those that you like;
- recommendation engines: https://www.literature-map.com/, https://www.gnooks.com/, https://thestorygraph.com/;
- direct recommendations from people I know;
- for reviewers whose taste and opinion I trust, I sometimes look up what else they’d reviewed.
if you can remember, how did you find books you really enjoyed?
In my schooltime, in some museum, an old lady I’d never seen again had a small rant on what modern people read instead of good literature; she also named some authors she considered good. I memorised one of them.
I used to lurk /r/printsf and /r/weirdlit, and note down anything that sounded interesting. I also sometimes look at award winners + nominations. I guess I’ll have to make more of an effort now.
I now almost exclusively read books online. Check out Hoopla or ICloud. There are various ways to search fiction/nonfiction new/old releases read or audiobooks. I get free access via my local library.
