Deciding Which Books to Buy

[Originally published on Cent]

Last night I ordered two books: 'Battling to the End' by René Girard and 'We are the Nerds' by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin.

I was talking to a co-worker the other week about what books I was reading when she asked me a cool question:

How do I decide which books to buy and read?
Well, in the case of Girard's 'Battling to the End', the last book he published before his death, I was reading a long-form write up published in The New York Review of Books about a new biography on Girard's thought - a figure and topic that I find endlessly fascinating.

Within that long, hyper-detailed work, several books were mentioned, including the book that I ended up purchasing. The way it was described just sounded kind of perfect to me.

Purchasing 'We are the Nerds' was inspired by a direct recommendation from @max in the Cent Slack yesterday.

"Been reading “ We Are the Nerds” - the story of Reddit’s founding and rise. It’s crazy how much overlap we have with their story, and am learning much from it. Highly, highly recommend."

If you love thinking about Cent as much as I do (and I know there are a fair few of you who do) how could you not scoop this book after reading that?

So long-form articles about interesting topics along with friends and folks close to me whose tastes I admire are two of the main channels I utilize to source new reads, but there is a third and fourth channel that I should mention: Twitter and podcasts.

Really though, Twitter and podcasts function as great book recommendation vehicles in a near identical manner to long-form reads and familar voices because, well, Twitter and podcasts are both full of familiar voices talking at length about interesting topics.

Cent could potentially become a fifth channel I feel - that's a large part of the reason why I'm so keen on @Justsomeguy's #dailyreadingclub experiment - but as of today, it isn't quite there. Soon though.

I'm curious if there are any other general good reads acquisition channels that I should be paying attention to?