I’m a big science fiction reader. Mostly I:
- Look up lists of winners and nominees for the big awards (Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C Clarke)
- Read reviews for successive books in a series when I liked the earlier ones
- Find articles on the top SF books of all time or by year, written by respectable sources
- Get recommendations from friends who also read SF
- Occasionally post threads in the SF community here on things I’ve read and see what comes up in the comments
I recommend a fantastic niche subreddit r/printSF to you as well. I’ve found many great books there and enjoy the discussion too. Sorry for reddit but that community isn’t nearly as active here, although it definitely has the potential to be since I always see enthusiastic discussion about SF books from Lemmyngs whenever they’re brought up.
Thanks, though I’m just not going to give Reddit any more of my clicks. I left there at the first big exiguous and I’m not going back.
There aren’t a lot of posts on the SF community here, but when I’ve posted something interesting it’s gotten a lot of activity, so I know there are people reading it. Here’s one from the end of the year.
Mostly just lurking goodreads, subreddits, forums, but also signing up to some newsletters.
This is what I do too except mine is StoryGraph. I sometimes look at what other users in community are reading, look those books up and try.
Libby too has recommendations from my local libraries. I check those out.
I’ll ddg a topic or genre I’m interested in, “top space alien novels” or “top novels in x universe”. Or I get recommendations from the podcasts I listen to, or the shows I watch.
Generally, I consume all the material on whatever new topic or genre that is interested me at the time, and then move onto the next.
my favorite local bookstore has employee curated picks scattered around with little hand written 1 paragraph reviews on the shelf. going in there is like a reward for finishing the last thing i read. i love independent bookstores
a fun thing that works in just about any bookstore is to go straight to the penguin books section. the standard of quality from them is quite high
- talking with people at some organised book events (Meetups/silent book club)
- talking with friends
- sometimes browsing Bookwyrm (fediverse Goodreads)
- scrolling through Libby
With difficulty. I consult several guides. Give the highly rated stuff a read.
Reddit printsf is good.
Reddit litrpg
Winners and nominees of awards. Nebula. Bram Stoker…
Goodreads.
Royal road
Scp foundation
Fimfiction
Ultimately, find a good author, read their everything.
The library. You can also pay them to buy books for you, which stay in their system.
I hit up ebook sellers. They give you like 10% of the book as a free trial. That’s more than enough for me to decide if I’m interested.
@Shkshkshk I used to use reddit, ive seen answers to one of my reddit posts like the same exact list made from the comments from chatgpt when asking for suggestions based off books i like so it might actually be helpful or it mightve pulled directly from my post where I stated my preferences and asked for suggestions. It was weirdly close to the old post.
Looking through hugo/nebula nominations.
friends
i used to use goodreads but since it’s owned by Amazon, i don’t trust it an switched to thestorygraph.com which has really nice recommendations. of course it recommends based on my usual tastes but often also has some books i would never have checked otherwise, which i quite appreciate.
It never really crossed my mind there’s even a possibility to not having something to read. Thinking about it a bit more, I see few reasons for my immediate thought.
First I’m quite slow reader myself. I read rougly 10 books a year so I don’t burn through as many books as some other more avid readers.
Second I read mostly SF/F and there’s just so many good books and series for people interested in this genre. And while not everything is perfect, I’m probably much more tolerant to some imperfections as a genre fan.
Third, I read in my (non english) native tongue and while we’re definitely limited in quantity, it’s usually a bit of a filter so most of bad and trash books are excluded. Who would pay to translate and print shitty book anyway?
We have two good local sites that helps. One is basically like “local goodreads”, the other is strictly SF/F fansite. Both have user ratings and reviews which help a lot. Also my best friend has similar taste in books, so we often recommend our findings to each other.
The esoteric method of YouTube citations + RL recommendations + Google search “[topic I’m thinking about]+ Reddit”+ source of the anime I’ve watched. It’s fine so far but I’ve just gotten back into reading so I may still add yet more esoteric methods.
If you have a Prime membership, you get 1 free Kindle book a month from a short list of “first reads” (some months you get a bonus title too).
I’ll also get on Libby and pull up my favorite categories and filter for available now.
