How to Find Good Books to Read

When it comes to reading, one important problem is how to find good books to read. After all, the goal of reading is to get as much value as possible. Don’t read just for the sake of reading. Read to somehow improve the quality of your life. That’s why it’s essential to find books that are worth your time.
To find good books, here are many ways to do:

1. Check Amazon’s lists

Amazon has many book lists through which you can find interesting books. You can start with Bestsellers to see the current best sellers and Hot New Releases to see the popular new books.

But don’t stop there. Many good books never appear in these global lists, not because they aren’t good but because they appeal to smaller group of people.

2. Find books that are related to a book you like

In addition to the lists, Amazon has a nice feature which helps you find other books you might like given a book you like. Just visit the Amazon page of your favorite book and look at the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought section. There is a good chance that you will find something interesting there.

3. See Amazon’s recommendations

One more useful feature from Amazon is its personalized recommendations. To see them, log in to your Amazon account and visit Recommended for You page. There you will find books that Amazon thinks you might like. To increase the quality of the recommendations, you should actively rate the books you’ve read. The more information you give to the system, the better it can learn about your taste and the better its recommendations would be.

4. Use What Should I Read Next

What Should I Read Next does what its name says: it gives you recommendations about what books you should read next. Give it the details (title, author, or ISBN) of a book you like and the system will give you a list of books it recommends.

5. Follow interesting people at Goodreads

The web is becoming increasingly social and the world of books is no exception. There are book-centered social sites out there where you can find and follow interesting people. One popular site is Goodreads. If you know someone whose reading list is interesting, you can follow her there to stay up-to-date with her reading.

6. Read book blogs

Book blogs can give you a lot of information about the world of books. AllTop shows you the latest posts of some book blogs.

7. Browse Gutenberg’s list

If you like old books, there are many of them at Project Gutenberg. There you can find classic books like The Prince or The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. To see which books are popular, visit the Top 100 list. Best of all, you can download the books for free.

8. Use StumbleUpon

Have you ever used StumbleUpon before? This service gives you random web pages in a channel you choose. Whenever you press the Stumble button in the toolbar, it will give you a new page that it thinks you might like. Set the channel to Books and you are on your way to find interesting books you might never hear about before.


Reference: LifeOptimizer.org