Huh! This was such a good question that I looked through my last n books read, to figure out how the hell I heard of each one, and the stats are something like:
Recommendations/gifts from friends/family: 12 Book or academic blogger reviewed it: 9 Mentioned on Tumblr or Twitter: 7 Promotional material (author is famous, won awards, heard them on a podcast, etc): 5 Impulse buy in a bookstore: 3 Bird book club: 2 From my classics-I-should-read-someday list: 1 I was trying to learn a specific thing and searched for a relevant-looking book: 1 Other: 5
So, mostly I get recs from friends and blogs. (Said blog list is really random and has been curated over many years—e.g. I really love this random history-of-Africa professor's blog, which features a new book review each week, so sometimes he's reviewing new work in his field in lovely detail and I'm like "this sounds fascinating, time to go read more history", and SOMETIMES he's like "here's this pulpy scifi book i adored as a kid and reread recently", so I get a lot of my more random stuff from there, lol.)
And yeah, basically anytime I see a book that looks remotely interesting, I jot it down in my Giant List O' Books file on my computer, and every couple months I stare at the list and move the more interesting ones closer to the top, and whenever I'm at a loss for what to read next, I just stare at that :P
(Also, a thing I've often used in the past, though it doesn’t show up in these stats, is "enjoy an author, go look up an interview where said author names their favorite authors, and go read all of those," which is a bizarrely effective strategy for finding good books. e.g. I have mixed feelings about Maggie Stiefvater's writing as a whole, but I absolutely adored I Capture the Castle, which she named as one of her favorite books. And I can see why; it felt like that book was doing a lot of the things Stiefvater wanted to do, but better :P)
I generally read a bit each evening when I'm at home, and a lot more when I'm traveling—airplanes are one of my favorite places in the world to read!
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Date: 2022-04-29 10:42 pm (UTC)Recommendations/gifts from friends/family: 12
Book or academic blogger reviewed it: 9
Mentioned on Tumblr or Twitter: 7
Promotional material (author is famous, won awards, heard them on a podcast, etc): 5
Impulse buy in a bookstore: 3
Bird book club: 2
From my classics-I-should-read-someday list: 1
I was trying to learn a specific thing and searched for a relevant-looking book: 1
Other: 5
So, mostly I get recs from friends and blogs. (Said blog list is really random and has been curated over many years—e.g. I really love this random history-of-Africa professor's blog, which features a new book review each week, so sometimes he's reviewing new work in his field in lovely detail and I'm like "this sounds fascinating, time to go read more history", and SOMETIMES he's like "here's this pulpy scifi book i adored as a kid and reread recently", so I get a lot of my more random stuff from there, lol.)
And yeah, basically anytime I see a book that looks remotely interesting, I jot it down in my Giant List O' Books file on my computer, and every couple months I stare at the list and move the more interesting ones closer to the top, and whenever I'm at a loss for what to read next, I just stare at that :P
(Also, a thing I've often used in the past, though it doesn’t show up in these stats, is "enjoy an author, go look up an interview where said author names their favorite authors, and go read all of those," which is a bizarrely effective strategy for finding good books. e.g. I have mixed feelings about Maggie Stiefvater's writing as a whole, but I absolutely adored I Capture the Castle, which she named as one of her favorite books. And I can see why; it felt like that book was doing a lot of the things Stiefvater wanted to do, but better :P)
I generally read a bit each evening when I'm at home, and a lot more when I'm traveling—airplanes are one of my favorite places in the world to read!