The Essential Question: “What should I read next?” | Hacker News Reader

The Essential Question: “What should I read next?”

thenewcuriosityshop.substack.com

61 pointsbenbreen47 comments

The 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 :)

Same. 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.

A 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.a...

https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_sf_masterworks.asp

I'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.

I 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.

https://ultimatebooklist.com/ https://ryanholiday.net/the-reading-list/ https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/index.html

Start somewhere.

Go places.

It's fun.

I'd extend the advice with "put yourself into a reading friendly context" so you wonder less and dive in more easily.

I 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!

Well, it sometimes happens if you read about the bool, e.g. Pynchon's V put me onto Heart of Darkness

After 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.

This 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.

Maybe 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.

Pro 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.

My 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.

Brilliant

One 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.

Read [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/

I 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.

At the risk of sounding* pretentious, the ping-ponging across the recursive footnotes is an intended and crucial part of the book. The whole "shattered narrative" was deliberately modeled on the experience of going through the expansion of television media and the balkanization of individual attention in western culture in the 90's.

Of course, that never slowed down, and we have bloody TikTok now, so it's not like it's a novel experience anymore. Read it how you like :)

*who am I kidding, I'm low-key doing an I Read Infinite Jest move. Judge away.

I got to the end and was very angry - it just felt like bad Bret Easton Ellis for the tennis plot (which is a low bar even then) and low grade Elmore Leonard for the drug rehab plot with lots of terrible jokes. There’s so many jokes one will find a few funny but he needed an editor. The speculative fiction parts are easy in hindsight to call off the mark except his riff on Quebec separatism in different direction, and the racism was pretty offensive.

I don't mind taking a long time to complete a book if the story is good. I just re-read a couple of Peter F Hamilton 1200 page tomes that took me over a month to complete (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained). However they were fun and I was immersed in the world building.

There are other far shorter novels I have abandoned after 70-80 pages because they're just not very good.

I 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.

Poster 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.

The 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

ever 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.

I gave up on the Booker Prize years ago. It's mostly hand wringing, dreary, navel gazing tedium, which is a shame.

i still re/read old winners though

For 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.

The article you list which is referred to reads to me like the books she is judging are not standing out on their own enough to instill in the reader a sense of their "greatness" as a work. Old school book awards were obvious then, and are obvious now. You know when you put one of those puppies down that you've done something that has re-arranged how you process life.

I'm not clear what in the convo changed your mind?

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I did not mean the article. I meant the Hacker News discussion. The link is to my comment claiming that the Hugos today are garbage but I can see how it would appear that I intended the primary story.

I 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...

I 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.

Aha! 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 if you’d like to give it a go :)

I signed up but there appears to be a waiting list. Is this real or just a way to figure out market fit?

You should be in now! Just trying to manage my limited credit that I’m funding the openrouter account with.

We 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

I have a project for people to OCR their Supernote notes using it all static hosted on github pages.

https://supernote.ifup.org

Thanks! I’ll have a look

I signed up and uploaded my reading list, but the chat bot says it doesn't have access to what I uploaded.

Oh how annoying! Sorry, that should be fixed now - that was a flow I didn’t account for originally (I figured people would chat first an upload once it gave them suggestions).

I have had several attempts at using ChatGPT to recommend me books and its failed in all but 1 attempt. And in that attempt, it just located a book from an author I like, but by a pen name I wasn't aware of.

It usually congratulates itself on the recommendation but I filled my DNR list pretty quickly this way.

What does your bot do differently if anything?

A few things - it checks the books it suggests actually exist is maybe the most important (I was really bummed to discover some Claude suggested for me did not). My main reason for building it was to hep me find stuff from the library, so there’s that as well. It also tries to do a little better than more of author X, by using the llm’s ‘understanding’ of the books and what actually mattered to you about them to build up a little profile of your taste and find maybe slightly unusual things that would work for you.

Oh, and it definitely does not pat itself on the back for suggesting books for you.

(You can see the profile it makes and correct it - it did a pretty good job on me)

ChatGPT always has a good sounding justification for the books it suggests, the issue is that I really didnt like the result.

I think theres a lot of work to be done in the recommendation engine space sadly.

Oh for sure. I think there’s a lot of potential in llms for this (lot more sophisticated approaches possible than what I have here). Ultimately it should be like one of those fantasy setting librarians or book sellers who looks you up and down and then just hands you the right book for the moment.

Edited to add - or just a really good real life one, it would be awesome if everyone had access to a librarian or bookseller with like an hour to sit and talk with you about books and then help you find some.

I find that theres usually a frontloaded benefit to most recommendation engines. I remember signing up for Netflix and the first 4 things it recommended were bang on. What it had trouble with was finding new interesting things for me on an ongoing basis once those low hanging fruit had been accessed. Spotify was the same. Once I had explored the initial new artists it showed me, further recommendations were worthless.

I suppose potentially the upside with books is it takes a while to exhaust the shallow wins compared to music and movies because the investment of time is that much greater.

For 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.

- 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?

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