That makes more sense. I was thinking about the big box discount store Big Lots and my first thought was "they have a Discord?" followed by "they talk about books!?!".
But this seems just way too broad, basically what I would see in a curated local book store that I have anyway. Maybe this was the intention, but seeing all those books without the context why they were originally recommended on the discord doesn't seem to add a lot of value.
Agreed. If that would be too cumbersome to add, then a simple counter showing how many times a book has been recommended would help guide, me at least, a little better than just categories.
I used to live in central London, so I know what you mean, but here's the thing: LOTS of people don't have access to curated local book stores, so doing the same thing but doing it online does add value. I live in rural Germany now. Reaching a brick-and-mortar bookstore is a 30mins drive, looking+paying for parking, 10 mins walk, and then the bookstore won't be curated at all. It'll be a branch of a soulless chain trying with all their might to stay afloat by pandering to whatever islands of book-buying-taste have half a chance of achieving critical mass given the geographical constraint: cookbooks, self-help, books on parenting and pet-rearing, paperback love stories, etc.
Personally, I really like the idea that's at work here, and I like the fact that it generalises: Find an online community that has self-selected for some kind of criterion. Doesn't even matter which, as long as there is a side effect of selecting for people who aren't completely brain-dead. Scrape it for book recommendations. Make it into a list. Done. Value added. Use affiliate links; maybe you can even get paid back for your efforts. As a book-buying consumer, I'll say: Let's have more of this, please.
> Find an online community that has self-selected for some kind of criterion
I’ll add onto that: find real-life friends/acquaintances who are both not brain dead and read books. Frequently ask them “what are you reading lately?” Not only does this lead to good conversations and deeper friendships, it results in an endless stream of book leads.
Most of the good books I’ve read for the past several years have been curated for me by two friends who are prolific readers and do all the work for me of finding new books. I occasionally find something they haven’t read, but they certainly do most of the heavy lifting.
If you enjoy the podcast or the newsletters, I do recommend the Discord (https://discord.gg/oddlots) - the folks there are generally very smart and it is a great place to discuss everything from the economy to climate to transportation to defense.
Very smart people on discord sounds like an oxymoron: why would anyone very smart contribute to the siloization of knowledge and support grow a corporate entity possessing highly questionable incentives? Discord is not a great place to discuss anything of substance.
If that's not clear to some now, it will be once monetization kicks in and the inevitable blowup and loss of accumulated knowledge follows.
You're using Discord to describe the same thing that could easily be applied to any social network.
Yes, it's borne of teenagers and gaming, but for all it's dark corners it's just the modern IRC. There are good servers, there are bad servers, there are servers full of idiots and there are servers full of very smart people.
(and we're way past monetisation kicking in, the first paid options launched almost 10 years ago)
> why would anyone very smart contribute to the siloization of knowledge and support grow a corporate entity possessing highly questionable incentives
Some smart people aren't as concerned with knowledge siloization as other smart people. I'm sure if you went to their Discord and suggested an alternative platform with the same popularity and feature set they'd at least hear you out.
Even though I know a decent amount of economic history I'm learning some fascinating things. E.g. that the U.S. imposed radical degrees of land redistribution in Asia post WWII, led by an impressive russian expat: Wolf Ladejinsky.
Why are they recommending a China Miéville book which won’t be out til the end of the year? I mean, it’ll probably be good, his stuff usually is. But I don’t think even reviewer copies have gone out yet?
And while Ann Leckie’s Translation State is great, I think you pretty much have to read the Ancillary Whatever books first; otherwise it’ll just be baffling.
Nice work but please consider fixing the cursor styling. It doesn't change to `pointer` when hovering over the books, which is what you'd expect as they are clickable. Then, when you click on a book to open the modal, the cursor does mysteriously change to `pointer` - and stays that way wherever the cursor is.
I agree that it shouldn't mysteriously be a pointer all the time, but using a pointer for the cursor is a preference, not a standard. In native apps (outside the web), the cursor is often not turned into a pointer when hovering clickable content.
It's everything mentioned that's then filterable via tags, there's a joe-recommended tag for books that are directly recommended by one of the cohosts.
I always preferred money stuff. I feel like the hosts have better chemistry and matt levine is one of the most read/respected financial journalists in the last 20 years. I always look forward to it coming out on a Friday.
I agree with your points about the tone. Money Stuff is definitely more "fun".
I find the content differs between the two, not just the presentation. Odd Lots goes into the broad scale (national, global) backstory a lot more; Money Stuff dives deep into specific businesses, people, or the technical details of a trade. Maybe your circumstances and habits mean you get more from one than the other?
I wish Bloomberg would find presenters for UK or European centric versions of both shows.
Got downvoted as expected, but I'm not trolling: book covers, just like the books themselves, are covered by copyright. I think the website looks really cool - but you cannot just use third-party material without permission. I know with AI companies crawling everything under the sun as training data, the idea of copyrighted material has kind of fallen out of fashion, but I think I've asked a valid question.
In the US, this use would be covered by the fair-use provisions of copyright law. You don't need permission to show a cover when writing a review of a book.
The book that I looked at had the same blurb on odd-lots-books.netlify.app as was used in my local library catalogue, so I assume it's the standard publisher's blurb?
PSA: 99.999% of people should ignore most of the entries on lists like this.
I devour reading material. I love books - fiction, non-fiction, audio books, trade paperbacks, newly minted hardbacks, old musty stuff in a basement, all of it - and subscribe to Literary Review and Granta, and check in on London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement when I can. I subscribe to quality newspapers and periodicals, and I'd rather spend an evening in a bookshop with late opening hours than a nightclub. Reading is great. Everyone should do a lot more of it - it's food for the soul.
But reading lists put together by other people aren't good for you. If anything, they get in the way of you figuring out what you want to read.
Here's some simple maths: life expectancy in my home country is 83 years for females, 79 years for males. I am male, have multiple (not imminently life-threatening), health conditions, and so with a little maths I can expect to live perhaps 25 more years. Sobering. But it is reality.
If I read a book a week (which is way higher a rate than the average reading rate, and slow for a fan of reading - but I like to absorb books a little more slowly), I am going to max out at 1,300 books in the rest of my life.
Most people read a few books a year. At that rate I'd have just 75-100 books to read in the rest of my time alive. If that were my number, I should probably make each one of those books count in some way.
You should do this maths yourself, and across a few dimensions. You only have so many books, films, music gigs, vacations/holidays, restaurant visits, whatever left in your life.
As an aside, you only have so many side projects, business ideas you'll get a chance to build and test in the market, and opportunities to invest in somebody else's ideas. You should do those maths too: figure out what your error bars could look like. They're probably not as optimistic as you'd hope for.
At first, this might feel terrifying. I prefer to see it as "focusing".
Do you really want to read all 842 of the books on that list? Is this the oeuvre you want to invest a sizeable chunk of your remaining life in? Are you confident this will make you feel whole, that you will get to the end and have no regrets about making this your mission? If you yes to all these questions, and are sure: brilliant, you have found a purpose in life few others ever will. Godspeed and good luck!
For most people though, lists like this are just another todo list that create a sense of inadequacy, FOMO or regret.
In 1880, the designer William Morris said "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful".
Apply this to your reading lists[0]. Curate. Edit. Find what makes your heart sing or your brain grow, and dive in.
Do not worry about what other people think you "should" read. Do not read "the great classics" if they do not interest you. Safely ignore award winning writers - from Nobel laureates, to Pulitzer Prize winners, to Booker short-listed authors - unless something about that book speaks to you and you almost yearn for it.
Because when you do that, you'll realise a) most books are junk to you (but might be great for someone else), and b) that as you start to develop the habit of reading the things that you genuinely want to, it becomes a healthy, mind-nourishing obsession.
Come on in, the pages are lovely.
[0] Actually, apply this rule to everything you can in your life. It can be hard to start, but worthwhile.
Unlike Krasnol, I found your comment helpful. Especially, the idea that knowing what to ignore is at least as important as knowing what's out there. Ignore the haters :)
Some of us lack access to good physical bookstores which are curated and allow for casual non-biased exploration. Amazon and other digital players never picked up on curation or segmentation, their store fronts are hot messes similar to digging through a random bin of books at a second hand store. To top it off they skew your opinion with customer ratings visible next to every single title.
So a list like this is a somewhat working digital alternative to browsing books in a curated bookstore.
For someone who wants to sell the idea of not wasting time on reading, you're trying to waste a lot of time with your comment. You wasted mine for sure so I'll hopefully help somebody else with my short comment:
----------------
- op basically says: don't pay attention to recommendation lists
- they assume you plan on reading all books recommended there or none
- they do not present an realistic alternative to finding books you might like
--------------------
Especially the last point is what I missed from your comment because it is actually a good idea to browse through other peoples recommendations to find similarities in taste.
Like in this list, I looked at the SciFi section and didn't find Neal Stephenson. Which, for me, is a sign of good quality together with other books I've already read. There are other books I have not even heard about. I might check them out and it would be a logical thing to do. Nothing wrong about it and chances are good that I might like it. They are certainly better than a wild guess.
There are 32 sci-fi books listed. Let's suppose you have read half of them, and you read 1 book each week. You've now just got your list for the next four months. Congratulations!
But wait, there's another list out there you're going to find tomorrow. And then another list, and another, and another, and they all have this same quality of having some books you've read and like, and nothing by Neal Stephenson. Then, when you're in the book store you see a book called "100 Sci-Fi Books To Read Before You Die", and you note it has these qualities but there are 80 books in there you've not read yet.
If you're busy pulling a sub-list together, you're doing the thing I'm suggesting: you're editing and curating, not just seeing the list in its own right. I'm definitely not suggesting you take wild guesses - note the magazines I read to find my own "next thing", and even that method is problematic.
I am not reading magazines, nor do I have the time to hang around book stores which0 here. don't even have qualified personal or a significant amount of Scifi literature.
So what is there left to do but follow recommendations online realistically?
Looking through the list I've found 2 books which might interest me. I'm done with the list now and won't return. If 1 of them is great, it is already a win.
Odd Lots is a podcast hosted at Bloomberg, and so the discord is about analyzing market crazes and important economic trends.
This explains why the book recommendations appear to be heavily focused on understanding history and economics at a deep level.
That makes more sense. I was thinking about the big box discount store Big Lots and my first thought was "they have a Discord?" followed by "they talk about books!?!".
Yes I was hoping this was the case!
I wonder what Solvej Balle is doing in there then ...
Interesting, that Superman Red Son is there, but I was not able to locate Orwell's Animal Farm?
Love the podcast!
But this seems just way too broad, basically what I would see in a curated local book store that I have anyway. Maybe this was the intention, but seeing all those books without the context why they were originally recommended on the discord doesn't seem to add a lot of value.
Agreed. If that would be too cumbersome to add, then a simple counter showing how many times a book has been recommended would help guide, me at least, a little better than just categories.
The collection is indeed just an unfocused list of recent American entertainment/mass-market non-fiction.
> curated local book store
I used to live in central London, so I know what you mean, but here's the thing: LOTS of people don't have access to curated local book stores, so doing the same thing but doing it online does add value. I live in rural Germany now. Reaching a brick-and-mortar bookstore is a 30mins drive, looking+paying for parking, 10 mins walk, and then the bookstore won't be curated at all. It'll be a branch of a soulless chain trying with all their might to stay afloat by pandering to whatever islands of book-buying-taste have half a chance of achieving critical mass given the geographical constraint: cookbooks, self-help, books on parenting and pet-rearing, paperback love stories, etc.
Personally, I really like the idea that's at work here, and I like the fact that it generalises: Find an online community that has self-selected for some kind of criterion. Doesn't even matter which, as long as there is a side effect of selecting for people who aren't completely brain-dead. Scrape it for book recommendations. Make it into a list. Done. Value added. Use affiliate links; maybe you can even get paid back for your efforts. As a book-buying consumer, I'll say: Let's have more of this, please.
That's fair - I just bought four or five books, a couple by authors I am aware of already and a couple experimental.
These days I look out for books that look a bit different from the ruts I mine and this list has been helpful in that regard.
> Find an online community that has self-selected for some kind of criterion
I’ll add onto that: find real-life friends/acquaintances who are both not brain dead and read books. Frequently ask them “what are you reading lately?” Not only does this lead to good conversations and deeper friendships, it results in an endless stream of book leads.
Most of the good books I’ve read for the past several years have been curated for me by two friends who are prolific readers and do all the work for me of finding new books. I occasionally find something they haven’t read, but they certainly do most of the heavy lifting.
If you enjoy the podcast or the newsletters, I do recommend the Discord (https://discord.gg/oddlots) - the folks there are generally very smart and it is a great place to discuss everything from the economy to climate to transportation to defense.
Is there a way to use Discord without using the awful childish interface?
https://github.com/DiscordMessenger/dm
Very smart people on discord sounds like an oxymoron: why would anyone very smart contribute to the siloization of knowledge and support grow a corporate entity possessing highly questionable incentives? Discord is not a great place to discuss anything of substance.
If that's not clear to some now, it will be once monetization kicks in and the inevitable blowup and loss of accumulated knowledge follows.
You're using Discord to describe the same thing that could easily be applied to any social network.
Yes, it's borne of teenagers and gaming, but for all it's dark corners it's just the modern IRC. There are good servers, there are bad servers, there are servers full of idiots and there are servers full of very smart people.
(and we're way past monetisation kicking in, the first paid options launched almost 10 years ago)
I suppose smart people can’t optimize for pure discussion? One of the most popular and easy to use messaging platforms seems like a reasonable choice.
> why would anyone very smart contribute to the siloization of knowledge and support grow a corporate entity possessing highly questionable incentives
Some smart people aren't as concerned with knowledge siloization as other smart people. I'm sure if you went to their Discord and suggested an alternative platform with the same popularity and feature set they'd at least hear you out.
I am reading "The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset" by their guest MIike Bird. Its very good.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221772645-the-land-trap
Even though I know a decent amount of economic history I'm learning some fascinating things. E.g. that the U.S. imposed radical degrees of land redistribution in Asia post WWII, led by an impressive russian expat: Wolf Ladejinsky.
and of course Odd Lots is great overall.
800 books? That seems too large of a list to be useful, even for the most voracious reader.
I agree. In my youth, I will just read anything that catches my fancy.
Nowadays, I have to be picky about what books I read, even one amongst a pool of books that I like.
That or I have to reduce my time for my other hobbies.
Good thing there are filters!
I found the sci-fi tag interesting and a managable 32 books!
https://odd-lots-books.netlify.app/?q=tag%3Asci-fi
Why are they recommending a China Miéville book which won’t be out til the end of the year? I mean, it’ll probably be good, his stuff usually is. But I don’t think even reviewer copies have gone out yet?
And while Ann Leckie’s Translation State is great, I think you pretty much have to read the Ancillary Whatever books first; otherwise it’ll just be baffling.
yeah I didn't notice the CM wasn't out til september and searched for it too.
The I wasted time reading (very mixed!!) reviews for the ones I'd not read so I just pulled the trigger on Revelation Space and will see how I get on!
love these ~5MB vibe coded HTML files, Joe Weisenthal is vibing hard
I'm not mad about it. Joe seems like a chill dude and is having fun.
it's built by a subscriber
Nice work but please consider fixing the cursor styling. It doesn't change to `pointer` when hovering over the books, which is what you'd expect as they are clickable. Then, when you click on a book to open the modal, the cursor does mysteriously change to `pointer` - and stays that way wherever the cursor is.
I agree that it shouldn't mysteriously be a pointer all the time, but using a pointer for the cursor is a preference, not a standard. In native apps (outside the web), the cursor is often not turned into a pointer when hovering clickable content.
Why isn't there a Tracey Alloway recommendation filter - I'm pretty sure she reads plenty as well?
Does "recommended" just mean "mentioned" or is this curated?
It's everything mentioned that's then filterable via tags, there's a joe-recommended tag for books that are directly recommended by one of the cohosts.
Mentioned, but there's usually a discussion.
Does this include "mentioned" as in "Don't read this book, it's full of errors"?
This. Same question for all those "I analyzed HN comments that mentioned books and you can browse them here" posts.
It recommends Consider Phlebas over any of the other Iain M Banks Culture books - surely thats not right
Here I nervously point out that it's my favourite of his books - and I have read just about all of them, certainly all the Culture novels.
No it doesn't mention the other books.
It just recommends Consider Phlebus
Exactly
What's Odd Lots?
It's a popular finance podcast. https://www.bloomberg.com/oddlots
Ah, thank you.
I would like to understand how OP was able to successfully scrape various channels. I've been banned thrice doing this.
Discordchatexporter probably
By the way, one of the best financial podcastst
I always preferred money stuff. I feel like the hosts have better chemistry and matt levine is one of the most read/respected financial journalists in the last 20 years. I always look forward to it coming out on a Friday.
I agree with your points about the tone. Money Stuff is definitely more "fun".
I find the content differs between the two, not just the presentation. Odd Lots goes into the broad scale (national, global) backstory a lot more; Money Stuff dives deep into specific businesses, people, or the technical details of a trade. Maybe your circumstances and habits mean you get more from one than the other?
I wish Bloomberg would find presenters for UK or European centric versions of both shows.
i like the show and i tune especially for the chip chippy chip chips show… all things semiconductors is always fun to listen to
Where do you source the book covers from? Is there a library to look them up or something?
Looks like books.google.com
Glad that Moby Dick is in there.
Love oddlots. Still grin when I recall the episode they did with Sam BankmanFreid. The transcript is worth reading if you haven’t before.
I love such lists. Thank you!
How did you acquire the rights to display all these book covers?
Got downvoted as expected, but I'm not trolling: book covers, just like the books themselves, are covered by copyright. I think the website looks really cool - but you cannot just use third-party material without permission. I know with AI companies crawling everything under the sun as training data, the idea of copyrighted material has kind of fallen out of fashion, but I think I've asked a valid question.
In the US, this use would be covered by the fair-use provisions of copyright law. You don't need permission to show a cover when writing a review of a book.
Who wrote the blurbs?
The book that I looked at had the same blurb on odd-lots-books.netlify.app as was used in my local library catalogue, so I assume it's the standard publisher's blurb?
PSA: 99.999% of people should ignore most of the entries on lists like this.
I devour reading material. I love books - fiction, non-fiction, audio books, trade paperbacks, newly minted hardbacks, old musty stuff in a basement, all of it - and subscribe to Literary Review and Granta, and check in on London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement when I can. I subscribe to quality newspapers and periodicals, and I'd rather spend an evening in a bookshop with late opening hours than a nightclub. Reading is great. Everyone should do a lot more of it - it's food for the soul.
But reading lists put together by other people aren't good for you. If anything, they get in the way of you figuring out what you want to read.
Here's some simple maths: life expectancy in my home country is 83 years for females, 79 years for males. I am male, have multiple (not imminently life-threatening), health conditions, and so with a little maths I can expect to live perhaps 25 more years. Sobering. But it is reality.
If I read a book a week (which is way higher a rate than the average reading rate, and slow for a fan of reading - but I like to absorb books a little more slowly), I am going to max out at 1,300 books in the rest of my life.
Most people read a few books a year. At that rate I'd have just 75-100 books to read in the rest of my time alive. If that were my number, I should probably make each one of those books count in some way.
You should do this maths yourself, and across a few dimensions. You only have so many books, films, music gigs, vacations/holidays, restaurant visits, whatever left in your life.
As an aside, you only have so many side projects, business ideas you'll get a chance to build and test in the market, and opportunities to invest in somebody else's ideas. You should do those maths too: figure out what your error bars could look like. They're probably not as optimistic as you'd hope for.
At first, this might feel terrifying. I prefer to see it as "focusing".
Do you really want to read all 842 of the books on that list? Is this the oeuvre you want to invest a sizeable chunk of your remaining life in? Are you confident this will make you feel whole, that you will get to the end and have no regrets about making this your mission? If you yes to all these questions, and are sure: brilliant, you have found a purpose in life few others ever will. Godspeed and good luck!
For most people though, lists like this are just another todo list that create a sense of inadequacy, FOMO or regret.
In 1880, the designer William Morris said "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful".
Apply this to your reading lists[0]. Curate. Edit. Find what makes your heart sing or your brain grow, and dive in.
Do not worry about what other people think you "should" read. Do not read "the great classics" if they do not interest you. Safely ignore award winning writers - from Nobel laureates, to Pulitzer Prize winners, to Booker short-listed authors - unless something about that book speaks to you and you almost yearn for it.
Because when you do that, you'll realise a) most books are junk to you (but might be great for someone else), and b) that as you start to develop the habit of reading the things that you genuinely want to, it becomes a healthy, mind-nourishing obsession.
Come on in, the pages are lovely.
[0] Actually, apply this rule to everything you can in your life. It can be hard to start, but worthwhile.
Unlike Krasnol, I found your comment helpful. Especially, the idea that knowing what to ignore is at least as important as knowing what's out there. Ignore the haters :)
Some of us lack access to good physical bookstores which are curated and allow for casual non-biased exploration. Amazon and other digital players never picked up on curation or segmentation, their store fronts are hot messes similar to digging through a random bin of books at a second hand store. To top it off they skew your opinion with customer ratings visible next to every single title.
So a list like this is a somewhat working digital alternative to browsing books in a curated bookstore.
For someone who wants to sell the idea of not wasting time on reading, you're trying to waste a lot of time with your comment. You wasted mine for sure so I'll hopefully help somebody else with my short comment:
----------------
- op basically says: don't pay attention to recommendation lists
- they assume you plan on reading all books recommended there or none
- they do not present an realistic alternative to finding books you might like
--------------------
Especially the last point is what I missed from your comment because it is actually a good idea to browse through other peoples recommendations to find similarities in taste.
Like in this list, I looked at the SciFi section and didn't find Neal Stephenson. Which, for me, is a sign of good quality together with other books I've already read. There are other books I have not even heard about. I might check them out and it would be a logical thing to do. Nothing wrong about it and chances are good that I might like it. They are certainly better than a wild guess.
There are 32 sci-fi books listed. Let's suppose you have read half of them, and you read 1 book each week. You've now just got your list for the next four months. Congratulations!
But wait, there's another list out there you're going to find tomorrow. And then another list, and another, and another, and they all have this same quality of having some books you've read and like, and nothing by Neal Stephenson. Then, when you're in the book store you see a book called "100 Sci-Fi Books To Read Before You Die", and you note it has these qualities but there are 80 books in there you've not read yet.
If you're busy pulling a sub-list together, you're doing the thing I'm suggesting: you're editing and curating, not just seeing the list in its own right. I'm definitely not suggesting you take wild guesses - note the magazines I read to find my own "next thing", and even that method is problematic.
I am not reading magazines, nor do I have the time to hang around book stores which0 here. don't even have qualified personal or a significant amount of Scifi literature.
So what is there left to do but follow recommendations online realistically?
Looking through the list I've found 2 books which might interest me. I'm done with the list now and won't return. If 1 of them is great, it is already a win.