Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly series hosted by Rukky at Eternity Books and Danie at Literary Lion. The full list of November topics can be found here.
This week’s topic is a freebie, so I thought it would be fun to talk about book recommendations.
Specifically, do you seek out recommendations from others or do you only read the books that you want to read?
I generally get book recommendations from trusted family or friends, or from social media. I would say about a quarter of what I read comes from recommendations.
Family and Friends
I’ve mentioned before that my mom and I have very similar tastes in books. If she reads something and likes it, there’s a very good chance I’m also going to enjoy it. I always take her book recommendations, no matter the genre, because our tastes align so much.
I’ve discovered so many of my favorite books through recommendations from coworkers and friends. However, there have been instances where people have recommended books I ended up not liking. I’m not good at pretending to like something just for the sake of making someone happy, either, so I am careful about who I ask for recommendations.
Social Media
I am very involved in the Bookstagram community on Instagram. I love to post about what I’m reading and to see what others are reading. However, with Bookstagram it’s so much more than just a pretty photo! A lot of readers will stage a beautiful photo with a book and then write a caption how much they didn’t like the book.
This feels odd to me, because I tend to only post about the books I enjoyed reading rather than those I didn’t like or had to DNF completely. Still, there are a lot of great reviewers who post regularly on Instagram and I think it’s worthwhile to browse photos and comments to get recommendations.
As always, I take recommendations with a grain of salt. I already have dozens of books I want to read so more often than not there is a slim chance I’m going out on a limb to read something someone recommended, unless I’m in a reading slump or am willing to take the risk.
Hannah's Library 
Most of my recommendations come from my husband, my best friend and a couple of bookstagrammers with very similar tastes to my own. I’m often put off when everyone is reading and reviewing the same book at the same time on social media so I often wait until the hype has passed.
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I’m the same way! When everyone starts posting about the same book, I wonder if they are getting paid to do so which in turn makes me question their “recommendations.” I’m guilty of buying into the hype though, it’s hard not to 🙂
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Most of what I read I’ve seen on Bookstagram and blogs ! As I’m French and read mostly in english, no one around me can really recommend books to me
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Blogs too! I forgot to mention that. I definitely add books to my TBR after seeing book bloggers review them. It’s great that you can rely on the online community for that! 🙂
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Goodreads and friends
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Goodreads is super helpful for that too!
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Mostly from scrolling through the WordPress app. I have now books stores within 2.5 hours of me, so I just put them all on a piece of paper. It’s a long piece of paper.
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WordPress is great for that too!
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