Matthew Southey

Recommended Recommended Reading

April 11, 2025

I’m always looking for recommendations on what to read. But I worry that I spend more time looking for books to read than actually reading them. I’ve gotten better at this in recent years—the best way to find a good book quickly is to get good recommendations.

This post is not about recommended books, but about recommended recommenders and how to find them. Vetting recommenders is easier than vetting books because it’s a smaller search space, and evaluating people is something we’ve been evolutionarily primed to do. The natural tendency to think in ad hominem terms is your friend: assess people on their taste and expertise, and then ask them what books you should read.

I think you’ll save yourself a lot of time by shifting from evaluating books to the meta-task of evaluating recommenders. Let it be said: I am not a good recommender myself, since I publish very few of my own recommendations. This is a mistake that I would like to correct by publishing more recommendations and sharing them. There are selfish benefits too: I can more easily compare my notes with others and find even better recommenders. And writing positive reviews causes others to buy the book, incentivizing the publication of similar books in the future.

One of the best sources of recommendations is the canon. History is the great recommendation engine in this case. What exactly is history (aka the Lindy effect) selecting for? Bloom might argue that it’s quality, and I agree somewhat, but there are other attributes too: legibility, ideology, timeliness, etc. History might be one of the most reliable judges, but it still has its biases. The downside of such an approach, is that reading the canon can sometimes feel like work—I want to want to read the canon, but often I just want to read science fiction. Part of the problem is that you’re entering into a conversation that’s been going on for hundreds of years with some of the smartest people to ever have lived. How can you read the original work when you don’t know its context, its criticisms, its translations, etc.? This same sentiment is expressed well by John Psmith in the first paragraph of his review of The Education of Cyrus.

Another excellent source are the recommendations of great authors: their influences or what they consider great books. Sometimes this requires piecing together clues from their non-fiction writing or interviews. See these extremely brief book reviews from Nabokov Very rarely, such authors might compile their own recommended reading lists. One of the very best examples is Borges, but other recommendations can be inferred from who Borges wrote essays about. I am referring to the two lists at the end of Selected Non-fictions on p. 500 and p. 511. Technically, they are lists of two collections of books which Borges put together and wrote prologues for.

Sometimes there are sources that do the ad hominem vetting for you, such as Five Books. They often select experts in a given field, such as “philosophy of language”, and have them recommend five books from that discipline. This is great when you would like to read about a particular subject area, but don’t know where to begin. Relying on Five Books recommendations is much less reliable when it comes to fiction or more general categories. There is no single expert on human wish fulfillment.

Every time you see a person recommend a book which you would also recommend, your credence that you can rely on that person’s taste should go up. For instance, looking at the “Staff Picks” shelf at a bookstore and noticing that Craig also liked Book of the New Sun, would make you trust Craig’s recommendations more. Many good recommendations can come from noticing matching tastes. Hypothetically a good place to do this might be a particular genre community such as r/printsf or r/genewolfe—but I’ve had limited luck matching tastes there. I’ll leave the selection effects at play in Reddit’s communities to the reader’s imagination. Goodreads used to be a far better resource for discovering books. Now it’s mostly a reading group for NYT bestsellers.

Individual book reviews can be helpful, but they can fail to give context. If a reviewer states “I really enjoyed this book”, they still might have read ten better books on the same subject. The same thing applies with yearly or quarterly roundups: it might’ve been the best book the reviewer read this year, but also the only one. It’s much more helpful when books are ranked in broader terms: “my favorite books on…”, “the best books on…”, etc. It’s important to know what the reader is comparing. It’s ideal when books are directly ranked against each other in a list. However, since many book reviews are done using the roundup format, this advice can be hard to follow. Tyler Cowen loves to give yearly roundups, or “What I’m Reading Now” on his blog. However, if you stalk his academic website, he has also given a more absolute list of some of his favorite books, movies, and music.

Sometimes you want online articles to read—this is a much harder problem than books. Maybe I’ll write more about this later, but it comes down to using an RSS reader, converting emails to RSS feeds, and then keeping your eyes peeled for recommendations. Recommenders like The Browser can also be helpful. Arguably, the best writing is online on blogs and Substack.

For brevity, I’m going to stick to the online, vaguely-rationalist space. More general interest reviewers might be added later. Please write to me if you have any suggestions, I know I’m forgetting a lot!

Here are some recommended recommended reading lists:

And here are some good reviewers who mainly do roundups: