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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

I very much agree with this premise. My skills fall into three camps: That which I have invented myself, from first principles; That which I have read one book on; and That which I am bad at.

One of the things I am bad at is finding books. Books are everywhere, most books are rubbish, and yet every book I've had recommended has been amazing. So, does anyone have a good book on finding good books?

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Gnod is the classic reccomendation engine that works great and doesn’t harvest your data. It has a search for books:

https://www.gnooks.com/faves.php

General Gnod: gnod.com

Wow, this has existed for at least 10 years, although the domain has had some wayback machine snapshots since like 2002 but I was too lazy to pinpoint where the project started.

I love finding stuff like this that have been going for so long.

Yes I thought it used to be FOSS but perhaps it is not to avoid corporations stealing the capability.

Beyond that I find just asking someone also interested or finding a forum about the topic to be a good place to jump into the basics. Usually someone has already asked the question, “what else like this?” somewhere online.

I have a weekly meetup for an unrelated hobby but I find asking “anyone see any good movies lately” to be a great way to talk about both old and new movies and break the ice during the social portion. Sometimes someone drops something I haven’t heard of related to the old or new movie.

I was interested in this, but my 3 runs in their recommandations engine were almost complete failures.

Their author list is plagued with homonyms.My first search had Dostoievsky in my 3 favorites. He was then recommended twice to me. It seems there are 7 distincts transliterations of his name.

Then I put 3 Italian novelists as favorites, starting with Curzio Malaparte. I was first recommended a Scandinavian poet. Other recommendations had 2 poets and one philosopher. Overall, nothing useful: either known, or definitely not for me.

My last run had 3 Russian classical novelists as favorites. The recommendations were a bit better, with two authors I'll try to read. There were obvious errors, like recommending Anrei Platonov then Andrey Platonov. And I really don't understand why I was recommended most of them, like Guillermo Cabrera Infante, or David Foster Wallace.

BTW, the site "doesn’t harvest your data" but their links to booklists are blacklisted by UBlock as adware sites.

If you go to the gnod homepage, you can see the literature map and it will maybe answer some of your questions. Sounds like you got 2 new recommendations at least already though.

Perhaps Literature Map?

https://www.literature-map.com/

There are sites where book lists are collected:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...

I can't suggest a book on it, but I think there's nothing wrong with just finding them through recommendations. If that's not happening organically, then there's:

1) recommendations/references in books you've read and liked

2) other books by an author you've read and liked

3) other books in a series (be it a novel, or some set of technical books on a particular theme for example) you've read one of and liked

the footnotes and bibliography of books you found amazing are good ways to find better-than-average books

I have started using large language models for book recommendations. I can be very specific about what I am looking for and the recommendations are hyper personalized. If you use some sort of tool that pairs LLMs with realtime data like Gemini the results are even better.

How often does it recommend Blindsight when you're asking for SF, or Malazan when you're asking for fantasy?

LLMs are actually great for book recommendations. Still not quite as good as looking up "HN best book on unit testing" for most topics, but great for niche things.

But, to be honest, my go-to move these days is joining a community and asking a well-regarded expert. I get all my recommendations from readers these days.

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