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The Essential Question: “What should I read next?”
- abstractspoon 2mo agoI always have a few novels on the go at the same time. As I finish each one I put it on the 'read' pile and pick another complementary book from my bookshelf whose last rereading I can't recall. This way I work my way through all the books I own before starting again a year or more later. No need to buy any more books ever...
- bobsoap 2mo agoI have a different strategy that I've greatly perfected over the years. I buy a book whenever one piques my interest. I squeeze it in on the bookshelf somewhere. Life happens and I forget all about it. A few years later, when I look for a new book to read, I find all sorts of books that I don't remember ever buying. I pull one out, start reading a few pages. Life happens. At some point my wife dissolves the ever-growing stack of half-started books on my nightstand and puts them all back on the shelf. And so the cycle begins anew.
- Sebastian_09 2mo agoI find the best recommendations to be the works cited in other works you like. You can press pause in a movie when the camera goes over the bed side table book, or write down the movie they go see in the book you read. Gives a growing list to discuss with your librarian, although some time you need to branch out. Nice idea that’s mentioned there, shame it is only for non fiction books, would be interested in a fiction equivalent!
- kreyenborgi 2mo agoWell, it sometimes happens if you read about the bool, e.g. Pynchon's V put me onto Heart of Darkness
- bentley 2mo agoAfter reading Allan Asherman’s The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan a few years ago, I embarked on a Wrath of Khan–themed read of books that either influenced the filmmakers or were referenced in the movie: The Prisoner of Zenda, Paradise Lost, A Tale of Two Cities, and the entire Horatio Hornblower series. Very enjoyable! I still have one left: Moby Dick.
- JennyWeston 2mo agohttps://ultimatebooklist.com/ https://ultimatebooklist.com/ https://ryanholiday.net/the-reading-list/ https://ryanholiday.net/the-reading-list/ https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/index.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/index.html Start somewhere. Go places. It's fun. JW
- jnpnj 2mo agoI'd extend the advice with "put yourself into a reading friendly context" so you wonder less and dive in more easily.
- monkeydust 2mo agoI use embeddings to create suggestions on what to read when it comes to blogs and articles. It semantically matches articles from sites I provide (like HN of course) against previous things I have read and a set of topics/themes I am interested in. It does this periodically and provides a suggested list of what to read next. Implemented this a few weeks ago and its throwing up pieces I might have otherwise missed. I am however concious that sometimes the most interesting things in a given day are not related to anything else I am reading or would read - this is what I get through scrolling through HN serveral times a day.
- giobox 2mo agoThis for me is one of the last great unsolved problems on the internet. I've yet to find a book recommendation site/algorithm/social thing/whatever that actually works well enough for me to trust it and invest my time in logging my own reads to improve the results etc. I've had far more success personally in growing my reading list with books I ended up loving by following a few people on Instagram who share their reading groups choices. Similarly, anytime anyone whom I vaguely trust recommends me a book I just order it immediately on Amazon and add to the input pile. It's vitally important for me to keep the next read pipeline well stocked - I get through a lot of books, and if I run out for whatever reason it can take me weeks to get the habit going again. Virtually every other form of media, I can find a recommendation system that works well enough, even if it's not perfect. Books have always been an outlier for me personally.
- kidnoodle 2mo agoAha! I was posting about a thing I made for just this purpose the other day - it is called Leafle. You talk to it about books you’ve read and enjoyed or not, and it uses that plus the fact that llms have very extensive knowledge of pretty much all books, to suggest ones you’ll enjoy (or in fact, that will meet your need - reading isn’t just about ‘enjoying’ after all). It can suggest them to buy, or as audiobooks, or it can find ones currently available to borrow from your local library! It is at https://leafle.nanosheep.net https://leafle.nanosheep.net if you’d like to give it a go :)
- spockz 2mo agoI signed up but there appears to be a waiting list. Is this real or just a way to figure out market fit?
- kidnoodle 2mo agoYou should be in now! Just trying to manage my limited credit that I’m funding the openrouter account with.
- philips 2mo agoWe have been working on a thing to solve this if it helps: people can oauth to their own agents for hobby projects to keep prices down. https://tokenpony.dev https://tokenpony.dev I have a project for people to OCR their Supernote notes using it all static hosted on github pages. https://supernote.ifup.org https://supernote.ifup.org
- kidnoodle 2mo agoThanks! I’ll have a look
- shellerik 2mo agoI signed up and uploaded my reading list, but the chat bot says it doesn't have access to what I uploaded.
- mohamedkoubaa 2mo agoPro tip: never feel guilty about leaving a book unfinished. If it's taking too long to read, pick up the next thing on your list.
- Arubis 2mo agoMy favorite rubric for this is: give yourself permission to put the book down and never pick it up again at page (100 - your current age). Which means that, yes, once your turn 100, you're allowed to judge a book by its cover.
- mohamedkoubaa 2mo agoBrilliant
- QuantumNomad_ 2mo agoOne of the books I most strongly remember giving up on was “Infinite Jest”. I only got through a few pages and trying to read it just made me really angry. I don’t remember why exactly, but I remember very strongly that it was so unpleasant and annoying for me that I absolutely did not want to read any further. Regardless of how important this book may be according to some. I have no intention of ever picking that book up again. I might miss out on something, but I’m fine with that. There are plenty of other books to read.
- jcalx 2mo agoRead [0] and wonder no longer — with the very important caveat that I too have not read Infinite Jest, so I cannot vouch for its accuracy. (I plan on reading it someday, and this has made me more interested in doing so.) [0] https://mattlakeman.org/2026/03/26/infinite-jest-extraction/ https://mattlakeman.org/2026/03/26/infinite-jest-extraction/
- stevenwoo 2mo agoI scanned it and it was very accurate to my recollection of listening to the audio book. There’s a lot of humor that didn’t work for me or this blogger throughout the book and the author had lots of racist stereotypes in there - I wasn’t sure if he was trying to tell us all of his characters were racist or that’s what he thought. If you do ever try this I would recommend the audiobook because the print book is huge and you get the footnotes inline in the audiobook and don’t have to ping pong back and forth a thousand times. I spend about 15-20 hours a week riding a bike and knocked the book out in about a month of working out.
- thataccount 2mo agoPoster is drinking the "Breen Cola". I don't find that prizes, especially modern ones awarded for literature, equate to "stuff worth reading". In most cases, something worth reading is going to typically be 70-80 years old—back when people had to use their imaginations and more extensive vocabulary that wasn't being doused and invaded by vile AI swill. The same thing is often true of movies in that the older ones are more well-crafted and better paced and carry messages still relevant now.
- arjie 2mo agoThe Hugo Award nominees are all pretty good. Winning isn't any more significant than getting shortlisted. For a short while I thought it was dropping in quality but a discussion here led to my changing my mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48929545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48929545
- dominotw 2mo agoever since i was a teenager i always read all the booker prize nominees and nothing else. But they've seemed to have jumped onto social justice bandwagon and are nominating books with an agenda. i have no problem with social justice and belive in mission 100 percent but for some reason my heart doesnt agree with books slected for an agenda.
- teh_klev 2mo agoI gave up on the Booker Prize years ago. It's mostly hand wringing, dreary, navel gazing tedium, which is a shame.
- dominotw 2mo agoi still re/read old winners though
- sien 2mo agoFor people who are interested in modern literature reading the Booker Prize winners from 1969 forward and skipping any book that you find dull after 100 pages or whatever is well worth it. Then people can stop as they get to the latest things that are driven by identity politics when they choose.
- doorpheus 2mo agoA few collections i've been reading are the sci-fi and fantasy masterwork ones by gollancz. A few standouts have been the dying earth by jack vance and A Voyage to Arcturus. There are some amazing works in here which i would never have found without the curation that shows the history and evolution the genres. https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_fantasy_masterworks.asp https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_fantasy_masterworks.a... https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_sf_masterworks.asp https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_sf_masterworks.asp
- kurthr 2mo agoI've read a lot of these, but many that I've never considered masterworks. I mean, I'm a Dick head, but that's a lot of representation on the list.
- teh_klev 2mo agoI own, and have read, quite a few novels from the SF Masterworks series. It's my go to for decent quality reprints of older sci-fi. Can definitely recommend.
- QuantumNomad_ 2mo agoThe biggest library in my country has a wide selection of books. I go there sometimes and find books that interest me. For example I currently have 8 books about different aspects of music production on borrow and am currently reading one of them. I never even felt a need to consult goodreads or other online sources when deciding on the library what books to look at or to borrow. Setting enough time aside and going to the shelves that interest me is enough, thanks to great amount of books they have there. In smaller libraries I more often end up empty handed because the books they have in smaller libraries about my interests are either non-existent or not particularly interesting. The library is one place where more is better. Even though they have a lot of books, I don’t get paralysis about which to choose, because only a subset is of interest to me. The problem is rather when the selection in a library is too small so that my interests are not well catered to. I like the big library a lot :)
- asdfman123 2mo agoSame. I've never had a problem finding what books to read next. That decision was made by past Dan, 1-5 years ago, by putting it into my reading backlog.
- pessimizer 2mo agoMaybe try to have a reason to read a book? There are an enormous number of books that have been written, but there are even more reasons than books. Reading bestsellers or books off of an awards list is a sure sign of having no interests. The difficulty is prioritizing the books you desperately want to read, because you do not have time for them all, you will die first. Also, and I know you will hate this, just stop reading fiction unless it is historically significant or an exemplar that characterizes a period in literary history you are interested in. You have not only heard enough pretend stories in your life, you've heard far too many. It's warped your mind. All day, every day, watching, reading, and listening to made up stories about made up people.
- stevenwoo 2mo agoFor new books I read the New Yorker and New Scientist book columns via Libby and add those to sample from my local library. This might get books before they appear on awards list like suggested by this algorithm and depends on one’s taste of course.
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago- my life is too short to read everything - there are too many things to read - how do you solve this problem on a global scale?