Can't we make reading a lot more efficient than it is right now?
More importantly, the same material is interpretable in many ways. For example if you ask someone what is the main point of Orwell's 1984, you will usually hear something about surveillance. But to me, reading it as an adult, far more important is the idea that we need war as an outlet for our surpluses. That might be in the Cliffs Notes but it won't be in the first blog post on Google.
There are a lot of takeaways from Orwell's book, basically on how "Stalinism with English characteristics" might look, extrapolating from Orwell's encounters with actual Stalinists in Spain. Orwell is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to be on the sensible left. But a need for war is not one of them.
(Brave New World has leisure industry as an explicit sink for surplus, though).
Chapter 1: Tell a bit about the author
Chapter 2: Tell about the amazing thing someone has done because of "the technique"
Chapter 3: Tell about the authors path to discovery
Chapter 4: More stories about amazing things people have achieved(note by this point the author has never mentioned what their great one thing is
Chapter 5: Another bunch of stories about how great the author is
Chapter 6-12: More stories from people about how their life was changed by the author. Possibly a sales pitch for an online course.
Chapter 13: About 2 paragraphs describing something super simple "Start a mailing list"
Chapter 14-25: More stories
That's why I think is better to read the best books on the topic more times, than few other average books repeating the same stuff in different words.
Literature and verse? Harold Bloom's western canon list, whatever its faults, is pretty damn good and could keep one busy for a lifetime. If you want to mix in more works by e.g. women or more asian works or whatever, there are very good lists for that, too:
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/whatbooks.html
(above includes Bloom's list)
Want to learn science and math from classics? The list from How to Read a Book should help, and St. John's College's reading list is public: https://www.sjc.edu
For a given topic, there's often a subreddit with a decent reading list in the FAQ.
Which topic(s) are you having trouble with?
Most lists just tell you which books are popular. I'd be reading nothing but Harry Potters if I followed those lists. I'm talking about choosing a book I will like. Not you, not the critic, not the public. Following these kinds of static lists doesn't really fair better than looking at the cover.
There needs to be some algorithm that can be applied to my books which is what I was hoping goodreads would do for me but their recommendations are a joke - they just recommend whatever goodreads author they're currently promoting regardless of what you like.
As for recommendation engines for fiction, I don't know any that don't have this conflict of interests you described with Goodreads. Personally, I tend to pick up books that are recommended by friends, writers I like reading and people on HN. There's way too much fiction to read all of it, but I try to aim for one (or both) of two separate types: insightful and genre-popular. Insightful, because I love to read new ideas, and genre-popular, because culture is pretty much defined by your ability to talk about it with other people.
- best books on <subject X>
- best books on <subject X> reddit
Look for titles most often mentioned/recommended by people in the <field X>.
I'm not proud of the number of books I've read. Actually, I would prefer that I've read less books, but that I've read more times the best ones (in my opinion).
I wonder what the perfect number is. For non-fiction, I guess you'll hit diminishing returns with most books in something like 5 iterations. But then again, I want to take a following challenge: pick one good fiction book, and read it 100 times. I've read (in Adler's "How to Read a Book", I think) that the way you understand and feel about a piece of writing will change profoundly after so many read-throughs.
I confess I am an impatient reader, and many non-fiction titles I read feel padded out with unnecessary verbiage. I do wonder if the tools we use to write have some bearing on this. When using a computer to write, the ease of editing means it's much easier to just write and write and write.
Imagine if you were forced to write your manuscript by hand. I'm guessing the length of your non-fiction manuscript would be shorter, sharper and more to the point.
Imagine you wrote a typical 250 page non-fiction book that is padded out in the typical way. Just before publishing, you get fed up and edit it down to just 50 pages that convey everything without any fluff. Your publisher will tell you you're nuts and insist on publishing the 250 page version. Why?
Imagine you are shopping for a book on a topic. You find 6 such books in the store. 5 are the typical 200-300 page pieces. One 50 pages. They all cost the same. You don't have time or patience to investigate their relative quality. Do you A: assume the 50 page book is a low-effort blog series repackaged in print. Or, B: bet that the 50 page version is a high-effort careful edit? Most people choose A and I'd bet they are almost always correct in current practice.
Tldr: Short books look cheap. Customers assume they are ripoffs and don't buy them.
Clearly the details have to spelled out somewhere otherwise there would be no way to create a TL;DR version.
I don't think anyone has invented a lossless summary algorithm for natural language so you are inevitably throwing away details, perhaps important details.
For English it must be crazy, but I am not aware of a single one.