There are millions of books in existence and only twenty-four hours in the day. I'm curious how everyone here picks what books go on (and, depending on your proclivity for dropping books mid-read, stay on) your reading list?

Librarian recommendations? "Best of" lists? Your favorite authors' latest? Social media recommendations? Whatever seems "hot" at the moment? Serial publications/anthologies? High school/college reading lists*? Covers/titles that entice you? Whatever your approach, I wanna hear it!

*This is a fantastic way of creating non-fiction reading lists, but I can't imagine doing this with fiction--I'm just not that much of a literary masochist.

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[–] misericordiae@literature.cafe 3 points 21 hours ago

Sometimes I see something in the weekly reading posts here that seems fun. I also try the StoryGraph recommender occasionally, but it often gives me a very narrow set of recs that I've seen 10 times already. (You can tell it not to recommend specific books or authors anymore, but I consider that a last resort.) Mainly, I look at a lot of lists (new releases, curated/themed, "similar"/"readers also enjoyed", etc).

Once I find something that looks interesting, I read a bunch of 3-star reviews on Goodreads or StoryGraph, to weed out stuff I'd be likely to drop. Whatever passes that test goes on my TBR.