A lot of influential figures publish their reading lists, like Bill Gates [0], Elon Musk [1], and Patrick Collision [2]

[0]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-201...

[1]: https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-h...

[2]: https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf

Browse a book store is the obvious answer.

But this makes sense, because a store will generally buy items that it thinks it can sell, so it'll come down to humans making choices about what's a good book. Of course, publishers will be pushing their latest items through their marketing chains, and so new books will make it to stores based on marketability to the store owner.

In the digital realm, this is less of an issue, and can accept more books, but makes the whole shopping experience very noisy imho.

However, I personally like to read those little recommendation cards that the shop assistants make. I've bought a few books outside my normal genre that way, and haven't been let down yet.

Read quality book reviews. I would especially recommend the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, but there are dozens of long-form journals of this kind.

Most newspapers also have book review sections, as do many academic journals.

Presumably if you're interested in someone or something, you can also simply peruse the internet to see what's out there, i.e. you can start with your interests rather than with what's popular or well-advertised.

By sticking to the classics and letting time act as your filter.

browse goodreads! go to local author talks! go to a local book club ran by someone well-read! totally agree with the above supporting long form review publications like the new york/ london/ paris review of books; they typically will write about a general topic whose sources are 1-3 books that are listed. If the long form piece peaks your interest you know exactly where to dig in for more information.

Best seller lists skew towards "branded" writers typically pushing (in my opinion) a diluted version of an existing thought that is re-marketed for our time. There is nothing new under the sun, so stick to the classics. Life is much too short to read mediocre books. (:

NLP text analysis by NNs to identify features that humans can't perceive but are shared across genres that are liked by the user.

(I'm only half joking - book discovery is a pain point in my life and I fantasize about this every time looking for a new read)

If it's on a bestseller list, it's already discovered. It's also going to be pushed by every book retailer.

Despite the obvious conflict of interest, you can get pretty far by talking to bookshop staff. They’re around the books all day, so it’s pretty much inevitable they’ll leaf through them and form their own opinions.

I find Goodreads recommendations pretty good, which are presumably based on a souped-up version of "people who liked $YOUR_LAST_BOOK also liked X".

Oddly enough, that's not been my problem for some sime now. Note that I largely read nonfiction....

1. Find a topic of interest.

2. Start reading at some arbitrary entry point, though generally favour texts with references.

3. Branch from there.

- Find the authors you most respect / who most make you think, and read their publications, and track down their sources and references, or where they're cited. Notes, footnotes, references, bibliographies, and citation indices are gold.

- Find the topics, questions, ideas, methods within the topic that you're most interested in and drill down on those.

- If you find yourself needing new skills in the course of explorations, pick up on those.

- Don't hesitate to ask for recommendations.

- If there's a concept that seems unclear, chase that down to its origins, and trace variants as the concept evolves

- Incidental histories and biographies can often provide further illumination.

- Eventually you should start constructing your ow structure or modle of the field or space (or subsets / components of it/them). This can further drive your exploration.

I think the key is looking for longevity. A book at the top of a bestseller list for a week is a mere blip. Books start catching my attention when I seem them out there for about 3 months- its not some flash in the pan or selling just because the author previously wrote a good book. Around 6 months, you start getting stuff that is almost certainly going to at least be entertaining. If something has been on the list a year or more, this is likely going to be a thought provoking book and something highly enjoyable. This scale has never really let me down- except maybe in the case of The Alchemist. That was such a miss and the language just so... vapid... that I actually downloaded a copy off the internet just to see if I got a bootleg mistranslated version or something. I read tons of books, 99/100+ times a book on the NYTimes Bestseller list for more than 6 months has been worth its time to read.