Here's an interesting question.
Given all the books out there,
how do you know what to read?
Or to rephrase that,
how do you avoid the bad or mediocre books
that just waste your time?
Well that is what we are going to try to answer
in this video,
though I think we need a more fitting set first.
Give me a second.
(upbeat music)
Alright, that's better.
So I've gotten a lot of questions
on this particular subject in the past,
but I'm just gonna go ahead
and read the most recent one for you.
I desperately need a video about how to efficiently develop
a reading list that saves you from stumbling upon bad books,
which may put you off a whole genre.
I'd also like to know how to read more books
in more diverse categories
and how to avoid abandoning the older items on my list
for a random book that I just heard of.
Now I do want to be a bit careful with this topic,
because when I think back to some of the best books
I've ever read, they've been things that
I've just randomly picked off the library shelf
or was given to by a friend,
and I don't want you to avoid those serendipitous occasions.
But given the absolute tirade of content
that comes out of the publishing houses of the world
and the internet,
in the interest of helping you triage
all the options out there,
I want to give you some recommendations
for how to find the best books in a particular genre,
and avoid wasting your times on the bad ones
or the mediocre ones,
or the ones that are just kind of padded out for sales value
if nothing else.
And the first thing we're gonna talk about
is one of my favorite websites in the world,
which is GoodReads.com.
I've been on Good Reads for quite a long time,
and I found many of my favorite books
in Good Reads recommendation lists
which I would highly recommend checking out.
For instance,
one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time,
Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything",
was right near the top of
one of Good Read's best nonfiction of all time lists,
and that's actually where I found it.
And Good Reads is useful for other things
besides just its list feature.
If you do see a book on a shelf at Barnes and Noble
or some bookstore or a library
and you're not sure whether or not to read it,
the reviews on Good Reads can be highly detailed
and can be very good ways to triage the books
you have on your list
to figure out what you should prioritize,
and a lot of authors actually have
very active Good Reads profiles.
In fact, Pat Rothfuss, who wrote "The Name of the Wind",
which is one of my top five fiction novels of all time
has an incredibly long review history,
which I have perused many times in the past,
and one day when I was just casually scrolling through it,
I saw that he had written a five star review
for a fiction book,
called "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland
"in a Ship of Her Own Making",
so I picked this up, read it,
and even though it's kind of a YA novel,
I found it to be a really good read.
So in short, Good Reads gives you an extensive database
of lists of all different types of genres.
I mean I've found cyber punk novels on their lists,
I've found hacker history
and crime history stuff on their lists,
so whatever it is, you can probably find a list about it.
It also has a huge user base
so there's lots of reviews for most books out there,
and you can use the review histories
of lots of your favorite authors
who are active on the platform
to find new books that they liked
and which you may like as well.
Now another great way to figure out
whether or not a book is worth your time
is to read a summary of it,
and there are actually several resources on the internet
that you can go to to find lots and lots of book summaries.
I'm gonna give you a few recommendations here,
starting with the free ones and then moving on to some
that do cost money.
So in the free category, I want to point you towards
two different websites which are each run by people
that I have a lot of respect for
and who I've been following for a long time.
First and foremost, there's the website of Derek Sivers,
who founded the company CD Baby,
which if you have any music on Spotify
or you know anybody who is an independent artist
and has their music on Spotify or Apple or iTunes,
they probably went through CD Baby,
they're kind of the OG in this industry,
and since then, Derek has sold the company
and spent a lot of his intervening time between now and then
reading and reviewing and taking notes,
really detailed notes actually, on a lot of books.
So if you go over to his website,
which is I believe Sivers.org/books,
you're gonna find a huge list of book reviews
with lots of notes and summaries,
which can be a very good way to figure out
whether or not a book is actually worth picking up.
And along the same lines,
my friend Nat Ellingson has another very long
and very detailed book notes page on his website,
which I'll have linked in the description below
because I can't think of the URL right now.
And that brings us over to the paid options,
one of which is NewBooksinBrief.com,
which I believe is just run by one guy who reads books
and then writes very detailed summaries of them.
Now on that site you can actually get access
to the first part of each summary for free,
and then afterwards I think it's about $3 bucks per summary
if you want to just buy them and get access to them.
And another resource that I've used in the past
is called Blinkist.
Now in contrast to New Books in Brief
which operates on a pay as you go basis,
you basically buy each summary as you want it,
Blinkist operates on a subscription model.
So if you're the kind of person that wants to devour
lots and lots of summaries,
it can be a very good option for you.
Now I do want to give you one word of warning
when it comes to book summaries,
because reading them is much like
getting the notes from your friend
instead of actually going to class.
You're getting a second hand account of the source material,
and that can be good for getting through that material
quickly and seeing what at least somebody else believes
is the most important points from that material,
but you're not taking it in yourself.
So there may be things
that would have resonated better with you
that are just omitted from their account.
And that example of getting notes from a friend
actually brings to mind one additional tip,
which is to make friends who like to read
lots and lots of books
from which you can get lots of recommendations.
Earlier in the video, I mentioned the book
"The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss,
and the only reason I ever read that book
is because a friend of mine
basically shoved the book into my hands
and told me that I had to read it.
Now usually when people recommend books to me,
I think well, my Good Reads list is already so long,
I've already got so many books that I wanna read before this
so I'm never gonna get to it,
but in that case, I read the book,
I put everything else on the back burner,
and I do not regret doing that at all.
That book was amazing.
And that brings me to something that this person mentioned
in their question.
They wanna know how to avoid abandoning the order items
on their to be read list,
or the TBR if you're in the Book Tube circles,
in favor of taking up random books
that people just recommend to you in the moment
or that catch your eye on the bookshelf.
And quite honestly, I don't think this is a problem.
Yeah, you probably want to get to the books on your TBR
at some point, they're interesting,
but just because they made it onto your list for a new book
doesn't mean that they're gonna have
a greater impact on your life than a new book will.
As we've talked about on this channel
and a lot of times in the past,
the greatest ingredient to learning is interest.
So if something catches your eye
and you're interested in it, don't shove that away
because you think you need to get through something
that was further down your list first.
Follow your interest and let it guide you.
In fact, while I'm thinking about it,
Martin you actually deleted
your entire to be read list, right?
- [Martin] Yes.
- Yeah, so there you go.
Now to round this video out,
I do wanna offer a few more pieces of advice
from my own experience regarding reading books
and having a lot of choices and all that kind of stuff.
Number one, don't finish a bad book.
Remember, the goal, if there is a goal to reading a book,
is not to turn the final page
and be able to say that you did it,
or be able to check it off on your Good Reads profile,
it's to get something useful out of the book
or to enjoy reading it.
You've probably seen all these people on the internet
talking about how they read a book a day or a book a week
and how it changed their life,
but to be honest, the number of books you read
is not a metric that's worth tracking.
I mean it can be fun,
but it's what you get out of those books
that really matters at the end of the day.
So if you pick up a book and you start reading it
and then halfway through you think
this is a waste of my time,
then put it down, don't finish bad books.
Remember, your time is more valuable
than what you paid for the book,
if indeed you paid for it at all.
But as a caveat to that tip, don't be overly concerned with
reading the best quote unquote books out there,
because the best books are just the books
that other people say are the best,
and like we said before,
you may gain something out of a book
that nobody else is going to see
because you have your own unique life experience
and your own unique goals.
And furthermore, even if a particular book
doesn't make it onto your favorites list
or doesn't change your life immediately,
it may send you down a path
that leads you to other resources which do.
For example, one of the books that I'm gonna talk about
in next week's video about books that changed my life
is one called "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality",
which is, at the end of the day, kind of a silly fan fiction
that basically writes the first Harry Potter book
if Harry Potter was a boy genius.
And I really enjoyed that book,
but I wouldn't say that book in particular changed my life,
but what it did do is get me interested in rationality
and heuristics and biases,
and that book led me to reading a book called
"Thinking Fast and Slow", which did change my life.
And last but not least,
don't forget to enjoy the process of reading.
One of the top lessons I've learned in life
is that you never really get there.
Whenever you get to a milestone,
there's just another milestone waiting
at the top of the next hill that you can see,
so enjoy what you read.
Don't worry about having read all the best books out there
because you're gonna want to enjoy the actual process.
And on that note of enjoying what you read,
one of the things that I am greatly enjoying right now
is the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories.
Though it is slightly inaccurate
for me to say that I'm enjoying reading them,
because I'm actually listening to them on Audible.
Now you know the deal with these Audible spots,
I recommend a book that I'm enjoying to you
every single time I do one,
but with the Sherlock Holmes stories,
I do have to get a little bit specific
because since Sherlock Holmes is so famous,
many narrators have tackled the task of reading his stories,
and you can find many different collections on Audible.
For example, there's a collection by Simon Vance
which is very good,
there are collections by a narrator named David Timpson
which is very good, but for my money,
the one that you want to get
is the one that is read by none other than
the great Stephen Fry.
Not only is his voice absolutely fantastic,
but this collection of stories is over 60 hours long
and it's only one credit, so for my money,
it is one of the best deals that exists on Audible
and I am really enjoying it.
And what's better,
if you're not already an Audible customer,
you can go over to Audible.com/Thomas
or text Thomas to 500500 on your phone
to get a free trial of their service
and a free audiobook download,
whether it's Sherlock Holmes
like I'm recommending for you right now,
or anything else of your choosing.
And when it comes to choosing,
you're gonna have a ton of selection
because Audible has an unmatched library of titles
across a ton of different genres,
ranging from all the bestsellers
to lots of really obscure stuff.
So whatever is on your to be read list,
if you have not deleted it like Martin has,
you're probably gonna be able to find it.
So once again, if you want to get started with Audible
and start listening to audiobooks,
which can be a great way to make your downtime
more efficient, the time on the bus, time spent driving,
time spent folding the laundry, all that kind of stuff,
then head on over to Audible.com/Thomas,
or once again text Thomas to 500500 on your phone.
Big thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video
and being a huge supporter of this channel,
and as always guys, thank you so much for watching.
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