Why does it suck nowadays?

I admit I haven’t read any fiction published in the last five years. I bought books, though—books published older than five years ago, secondhand books, recent nonfiction, and a new collection of old pieces. I was burned too many times by irredeemable books I saw on the internet (see DNF).

Recommendations were no longer personal.

Remember when people came up to you on your face, telling you you have to read this book? They do that because they want to discuss the book with you or because you’re an avid reader. Sometimes, if you’re friends with them enough to know each other’s preferences, they do that because they know the book is right up your alley. People of flesh and blood recommend books to you that they have read, that they have strong feelings about (on either end of the spectrum) and they want to know your thoughts about it. They have an emotional investment in it.

It’s no longer a diagnosis before prescription.

Another way in which people recommend books to me would be centered around these things:

1. What I am trying to achieve as a writer

2. What specifics or topics I am learning or trying to look into

3. What will help me in improving my writing skills

People would ask me, interview me, about my motives. They would then think of books aligned with that or a solution to my problem before telling me which book to pick up. They were the same books they could confidently recommend because they’d read and analyzed them thoroughly enough to know that they would solve my problem or satiate my curiosity. And their recommendation is usually not only limited to books, it can be a mix of TV, film, comics, music, and even video games just to drive the point in.

We’re now getting recommendations from social media.

Whichever platform you are in, you're probably aware by now that all of them have an algorithm that pushes content to you which makes sure you stay on the platform scrolling so that they can show you more ads. They get their profits from these ads as these platforms are free to use. If one of your interests is books, you were probably shown content related to it. Et viola, welcome to booktok, bookstagram, or booktube.

Are they recommending you books or are they just hopping in the newest trend about popular books?

If you’re getting the same content about the same books over and over again, or if there’s a sudden rise of a book being shown to you, it’s a trend. They’re doing it to grow their audience and get more views because the algorithm works that way. Doing this more, then adding a pervasive algorithm, and then a sprinkle of preference of convenience, then you got a whole new monster – homogeneity. The social media experience is a curated experience – an intentional behavioral hacking using intermittent reinforcement, teaching you to prefer the same thing as everybody else. Thinking differently will lead to uncomfortable, unpleasant feelings so it’s best to avoid it. We don’t read books for this. We read books to experience a life that was different from ours. We wanted to join our favorite characters go through their highs and lows, facing their conflicts, and winning over them. This is the antithesis of homogeneity, trends, to the algorithm, to the modern book recommendation experience. Haruki Murakami said in Norwegian Wood, “If you only read what everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

Motivation gets murky when there’s a financial incentive to do it.

On one hand, there’s the paid sponsorship in the content you’re watching. It’s honest, it’s there on your face, and you’re aware of it. On the other, there’s the content that doesn’t have any paid sponsorship but is earning ad revenue through views. It’s innocent, seems genuine, and it camouflages itself. Either way, both are motivated by money – one was by commission or paid by a company that is marketing the product, the other by the platform as their ad revenue share. However, I’d argue that the ad revenue one is a lot more murky because to earn more, you need more views. To get more views, you need to be on trend. It’s a vicious cycle.

The algorithm is a hungry god that demands several sacrifices daily in order to favor you. Thus, the birth of the tropification of books and the end of the reading.

The secret to the endless scroll is endless content. The algorithm demands multiple posts daily so that the influencer’s content gets pushed to more people, thus gaining more views. This is what they call, “being blessed by the algorithm gods”. If you’re an influencer with books as content, where books take time to read through, you’ll be stuck with having nothing original to post for a long time. Enter tropes, aka the pigeonholing of an entire 50k+ word book into three-word categories. Tropes work in two ways: it makes the algorithm’s work easier since it cannot read entire books and can only work on categories to prop up its recommendation settings: and it makes the influencer’s work easier because they can skim the book, confirm the tropes perpetrated by other influencers or the publisher, and then post. Microtrends last shorter than it takes to finish a book (not unless the book is made to be skimmed over) so better get on with the tropes to get the views. This is why we get book influencers confessing they skim over large swats of texts on a book or ranting about why there’s a lot of text in a book. I’m sure any other author and the people who love a book that gets the trope makeover would say that it’s so much more than that, except maybe for books that are made by mashing popular tropes together and working the plot from there.

Bridging the gap in the digital era.

Only trust books that have blurbs at the back.

Think of this as some kind of rebellion. Books that have blurbs on them at the back cover are confident with their stories. They don't feel like cheating the readers by going through the hoops of researching the story as if they're relying on the cover to push it out of the checkout counter. Books with blurbs don't have anything to hide, particularly tired cliched tropes and bad writing.

Ask your local booksellers or librarians.

Ask them about what books they would recommend. Don't just ask about it generally. Give them something specific like a well-researched history retelling of a love story during World War 2. I'm sure they can recommend a handful. What's best about these kinds of recommendations is that they would tell you more than the blurbs (if the book has any), giving you a peek into the nuances of the story. Sure, they can be sales, but at least you're guaranteed that they've read the book enough to place their faith in it. Librarians are even better. The only stake they had in it was you supporting the library by making sure you loved your reading experience enough to trust their taste and continue visiting the library.

Ask your friends.

I don't think I can recommend a book club because most would read a book for a week and then discuss it in the next meeting. If you like that route then that's okay too. But I prefer asking your friends, or people you like or aspire to be. Make sure that they have a huge library first, and check if the spines have cracks or if the pages are dog-eared. The definitive proof that a book is loved is if it was battered. These people would let them borrow your books for free and sometimes the only form of payment they would like to receive in return is to hear your opinion about it and discuss it with you.

Bonus: If you’re watching video essays and documentaries, take note of the book references they cite. Those were the real goal mines.

And if you're reading to improve your writing, better ask your editors what book they would recommend to help you get over the challenge they keep seeing in your output.

There, I've just told you how to find books that you'll love, build real (not parasocial) relationships bridged by a common interest, and have a more meaningful life rather than doom scrolling on the rectangular screen, all in one essay.

Book recommendation is an art form. We’ve been doing it wrong (only recently).

5/5/2025