About GiveMeABookRecommendation.com

A Message From The Webmaster

Hi! I'm Jeff Sexton, and in addition to reading 250+ books each year for the past few years, reviewing every single one, and running BookAnon.com... I'm also a professional web developer.

I've had a small scale recommendation engine for several months on another site that was exclusively the books I had read that had been published already, but it wasn't near as detailed as this site - all it had was the book's title and author.

Recently I saw several people - specifically authors Meredith Schorr and Ann Garvin, among others - asking for a more general book recommendation site that wasn't beholden to any publisher or publication. And while I suggested this feature to both Hardcover.app and The Story Graph, who knows if or when either of them will implement it.

In the meantime, this site exists and will never be beholden to anything other than... well, you.

You see, you - yes, you, personally - can help make this site ever better.

How? Download your Goodreads Export. I'll give directions momentarily. Once you have it, email it to me. I'll then add your own recommendations to the engine, and others who come to the site will then be that much better informed for having had a chance to see your own recommendations, potentially.

How To Use This Site

To get a new book recommendation, simply refresh the page - however you do that in your own browser. Refresh to your heart's content or you find something that you want to read, whichever may happen first.

For the book site links below every review: A light green border means the link is taking you directly to that book on that site. A black border means the link is taking you to that site's search results for that title and author.

To Download Your Goodreds Export (Desktop/ non-mobile version)

  1. Login to Goodreads
  2. Go to the "My Books" page.
  3. On the left side of the screen, there is a section titled "Tools" with a link for "Import and Export" underneath it. Click that link.
  4. At the top of this new page, there is a button that says "Export Library". Click this button and follow any prompts.
  5. The page will "think" for a bit, but not terribly long - my own 7,000 book library took seemingly less than 5 minutes.
  6. Once the page is done "thinking", it will present you with a link to download an Excel file.
  7. Download the file and email it to me at jeff@bookanon.com, along with your preferred Username for this site. (This is how others will - eventually - be able to find a recommendation from you on this site.)
  8. Bask in the glory of contributing to a truly free book recommendation engine helping to promote all authors across all genres and situations.

Development Roadmap