15
votes
How do you find new books to read?
We all have plenty of books on our bedside table, waiting their turn. What makes you choose the ones you do?
We all have plenty of books on our bedside table, waiting their turn. What makes you choose the ones you do?
Bookshops. Physical, bricks-and-mortar, bookshops.
I've always liked browsing the aisles and the shelves, and just seeing what I stumble across. I used to frequent a lot of secondhand bookshops, but they're a dying breed. These days, I've found a local store which sells remaindered books at cheap prices. I wander in there every couple of weeks and see what's turned up since I was last there.
I don't get online shopping: I don't know how to browse online. I can shop online if I already know what product I want to buy, and it's just a matter of finding the most suitable item for the best price. But book shopping isn't like that for me most of the time. Book shopping involves an element of random discovery. I want to browse a shelf, and see random titles, and pick them up, and read a few pages here and there to see what it's like. Online shopping is for when I know exactly what book I want to buy. But, that's not how I buy most of my books.
I’d probably do the same but very few science fiction books are translated to Portuguese, and our physical libraries carry a small selection of foreign books, which are usually imported and therefore expensive. So online shopping and digital formats are a must for me.
Bookshops in general are a dying breed - new and secondhand. We used to have a few national book retailers and a variety of smaller book retailers, but they all seem to have dropped off the radar, one by one. It can't be Amazon's fault: they only launched here about a year ago, and the bookshops vanished long before that.
I just did some research. Of the three large retailers:
One went into administration and closed down.
One went into administration and its website is now owned by another publisher, which runs it as a clone of its own website.
One still operates retail stores which sell a variety of products alongside books, including CDs and DVDs. (I know of only one of these stores in my area.)
There are also a couple of small retailers left: I can think of two chains in my city (one with about a dozen stores, one with about two or three stores), but that's it.
There are very few bricks-and-mortar bookshops around compared to what I remember 20 years ago.
I have a list of books I want to read. I add stuff to it from various sources, like book reviews, interesting stuff recommended to me, interesting books that pop up in the "What are you reading these days" threads at ~books, bibliographies of papers/books I read, etc.
I stumble upon something interesting while looking for some particular book on online bookstores.
Sometimes I like popping into a bookshop and browsing stuff randomly. Opening and reading a few pages, looking at the covers, etc. I've discovered many authors in that way, which later became my favourites.
I follow literary journals, which have critiques of books, and sometimes notices of recently published stuff. They also contain texts published by various authors, and constitute the forefront of literature.
Honestly sometimes I just browse my library for something that looks good, if not in person then through the app they use for ebook distribution. I also add things to my book wishlist on thrift books (or Amazon, if it's newer and cheaper there) as I come across them on the internet or in talking with people.
At this point I've built up such a large backlog of stuff I want to read that it'll probably be years before I get through it all, even as a fairly avid reader.
Generally: bibliographies of books or articles I've read of interest.
This typically works better for nonfiction than fiction, though there are exceptions.
Reverse-citation searches (works citing those I'm impressed by) and general subject searches likewise.
Worldcat rocks (mobile interface excepted). Bang
!worldcaton DDG.Google Scholar, Microsoft's similar tool, Google Books, and a massive metric fuckton of Sci-Hub and LibGen downloads -- also Intrnet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and others.
I am on zarrow dangers of running out of things to read.
When exploring a new genre, theme or author, I consult lists. Lots of them. I like reading but the ADHD makes it hard. Whatever I read must be really engaging. Right now I’m on a multi-year sc-fi binge. Lately I’ve read All You Zombies and now I’m reading Door Into Summer. The way Heinlein writes is very compelling to me.
Goodreads and genre-specific subreddit are also good references. Sometimes I ask for suggestions too.
In addition to everything else mentioned here, Amazon's "people who bought this also bought.." is quite good. Find a book you know you like and see what they suggest to go with it. I don't generally buy books from Amazon because their DRM is a faff but it's a fairly good means of book discovery. I've found quite a few new (to me) authors that way.
I rely heavily on recommendations from people I know, either from personal conversations or via Twitter. I've also had great success in finding authors I like by reading about authors I already like and seeing who they claim as influences. (This was my introduction to Borges.)
Related to the discussion, do others of you have such a backlog of books that you find yourself curating this list, sometimes to the detriment of actually reading? This used to be less of a problem for me when libraries limited me to checking out a few books, and I didn't have a camera or notepad app to jot all the other hot items down with.
I have an absolutely massive backlog of books I want to read but don't find that detrimental to my reading at all. It sounds to me like you might need to centralize your wish list and streamline the process so you don't need to spend so much time/effort curating it. I just use the built in Kindle Wish List, and whenever I am done a book just quickly scan through that list to figure out what I am in the mood to read next. But if you don't have a Kindle, Goodreads is pretty popular for that as well, especially if e-books are not really your thing.
No, I don't have a problem with what to read next, mine is more the tendency to pretend I'm a frustrated librarian. Mine isn't so much a backlog problem as the ability to store and read multiple volumes at once.
Heh, I hear you. So much interesting stuff out there to read and just not enough time. But I absolutely cannot juggle multiple books at once and so don't even try. Heck, I can barely even handle consuming multiple types of media at the same time (e.g. tv, movies, books, etc), so I tend to focus on one at a time and just binge on that exclusively until I get bored with it and move on to the next. A few months catching up on tv shows I missed, a few on movies, then a few on books.... rinse, repeat.
I simply go to a used media store in my city and look for new or undiscovered works by authors I read. Mostly, I read horror, thriller/suspense, and non fiction (especially true crime, world war two & biographies).