It should be easier than ever to find great new books to read, but I find that finding great new books is almost hit or miss. I’ve stumbled upon too many good books on the recommendation of someone I’ve sat next to on an airplane, or because I read a comment on a website somewhere.

I’ve found as many good books from Amazon.com‘s recommendation engines and related lists as I have anywhere else. I’m lukewarm on computer generated recommendations, though. They always seem to point me to books I already know about and for good reason have chosen not to read, not to books that I don’t know about and should. Amazon does keep lists of bestsellers, award winners, and editor’s picks, and these are always great things to mine for the next good thing. The lists that the readers make are also quite good, and have often been a good way to explore a new author or topic.

LibraryThing is clearly trying to fill this space, but seems like a waste of time to me: like Amazon’s automatic recommendations, but more difficult, since I have to enter in all of my books by hand.

I subscribe to the Sunday New York Times, and the book review section is always the first thing I read. I never really find any books I’m dying to read from its pages, though. There are a few exceptions: I heard of The Road months before Oprah did. But most of the time it just focuses on Important Books, like some new biography of Truman, and not books that anyone ever reads. Ditto and more so for the New York Review of Books. I have as many intellectual pretensions as the next man, but, really, snore.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of my local library. Through their web site I subscribe to several booklists that are managed by DearReader. New Fiction, New SciFi, Hot Picks, etc.

Two of the magazines I make time for are Paste and The Week. Both have very good book review sections, and editors who don’t try to be too clever. I found Raw Shark Texts through Paste, and a number of others, including The Ruins and The Keep, through The Week.

But it seems to me that a real opportunity is being lost. I’m a web2.0 kind of guy, but the way I find books are very 1980-ish. Why isn’t there a reddit type web2.0 site for books, where people can vote up books they like? Or something. There has to be some way to connect people with the books they want to read, doesn’t there?

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