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.