when you are buying/selecting books to try, what's your general selection process?
I have some dim & distant memory of running stats on this once, and do not know where those stats went! but IIRC it was something like:
~30% of what I read, I first heard about via someone on Tumblr/Twitter mentioning it. I follow a pretty eclectic group of people on those places, so a lot of the random academic books or nonfiction tomes I pick up, I hear of via those places
~20% of what I read, I first heard about via some blog I subscribe to via RSS. (this is pretty similar to the former category, but there tend to be consistent "themes", e.g. if I'm reading a nonfiction book of anthropology / South African history, i probably first heard about it via Timothy Burke's blog specifically, etc)
~20% are direct recommendations from friends
"the rest" are via some gestalt of "it was a bestseller" / "saw it on the shelf" / "read about it in some mainstream news source" / "it's a classic everyone's heard of" / "I already knew I liked the author" / etc
I keep a running list of everything that made me go "huh, that looks interesting," and often check out a LOT of things from the library (or occassionally impulse-buy) things from that list—I don't read all of them, but when the mood strikes for "hm I'd like something like [x]," it's easy to check that list and see what fits.
There's some factors that can make something particularly a rec or an anti-rec (e.g. I seem to enjoy Booker Prize winners / longlisters more than the average contemporary novel; I seem to hate anything that has the word "cozy" anywhere in their marketing copy, etc), but mostly it's just whims & starting way more books then I actually finish since sometimes you gotta read a couple chapters to find out Actually I Hate This haha
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Date: 2024-06-07 01:44 am (UTC)I have some dim & distant memory of running stats on this once, and do not know where those stats went! but IIRC it was something like:
~30% of what I read, I first heard about via someone on Tumblr/Twitter mentioning it. I follow a pretty eclectic group of people on those places, so a lot of the random academic books or nonfiction tomes I pick up, I hear of via those places
~20% of what I read, I first heard about via some blog I subscribe to via RSS. (this is pretty similar to the former category, but there tend to be consistent "themes", e.g. if I'm reading a nonfiction book of anthropology / South African history, i probably first heard about it via Timothy Burke's blog specifically, etc)
~20% are direct recommendations from friends
"the rest" are via some gestalt of "it was a bestseller" / "saw it on the shelf" / "read about it in some mainstream news source" / "it's a classic everyone's heard of" / "I already knew I liked the author" / etc
I keep a running list of everything that made me go "huh, that looks interesting," and often check out a LOT of things from the library (or occassionally impulse-buy) things from that list—I don't read all of them, but when the mood strikes for "hm I'd like something like [x]," it's easy to check that list and see what fits.
There's some factors that can make something particularly a rec or an anti-rec (e.g. I seem to enjoy Booker Prize winners / longlisters more than the average contemporary novel; I seem to hate anything that has the word "cozy" anywhere in their marketing copy, etc), but mostly it's just whims & starting way more books then I actually finish since sometimes you gotta read a couple chapters to find out Actually I Hate This haha