Such as a magazine, website, TV programme, newspaper.
I few years ago we had a subscription to a weekly magazine called ‘The Week’ which would sum up the week’s national and international papers.
Near the back it had a section on recommended books.
Anyway the subscription ran out and I never really noticed. It wasn’t my subscription.
Well I’ve paid for another subscription to it. But can you doperinos recommend another source of recommendations for good books?
It would help if you’d give us some idea of what you mean by “good”.
Try the Straight Dope Message Board – the forum called Cafe Society.
If you go to the trouble of cataloging your books on librarything (free for the first 200 books, IIRC), the site will automatically generate a list of books likely to be of interest to someone with your collection. I’ve found it remarkably good at predicting what I’ll like.
Try winners of the Man Booker Prize. Its a British award for the best fiction book of the year.
I subscribe to Bookmarks magazine. They publish reviews of about 50 books in each issue – literary fiction, crime, SF, nonfiction, biographies, etc. – as well as feature stories on authors, book groups, and bookstores. You’ll get a description of the book, snippets of criticism from several different sources, and a “critical summary”. Negative comments are included along with positives. It’s well worth the subscription price.
I agree with Hello Again. I don’t put a lot of stock in prizes, but I’ve liked a lot of Booker winners.
I also like the reviews published in The Guardian. But I don’t trust Time or Newsweek, People, or USA Today, or Entertainment Weekly.
Oh, I want that so badly now! Thanks for nothing!
(I would, however, hit the top of the idiotically pretentious charts if I did read it, because I’m sure it would only increase my tendency to declaim at length about books I’ve never read.)
There’s goodreads. Find a few people whose tastes match yours and then read what they do.
Thanks all. The first two posts were useless but I’m glad some people have the ability to interpret meaning from typed English.
I think I’ve bought books reccomended by the Man Booker prize before, but I had forgotten about them - hence this thread for asking about places that consistently recommend good books.
Most recently this -
http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/books/369
I can’t remember where I’d seen the recomendation. It must have been in a magazine that indirectly referenced it as one from the booker longlist.
It’s a very good book.
Damn, but that’s some unwarranted snark. Different people have vastly different tastes and vastly different standards for what constitutes a good book. Without knowing your tastes, it’s hard to know what source would provide useful recommendations for you. twickster’s mention of this board is a bit snarky, but a reminder that if you give folks a better idea of what you’re looking for, folks around here can make some recommendations directly.
Daniel
I didn’t care for it. Maybe that’s a sign that my recommendations won’t suit you. 
(Seriously, you were okay with that ending?)
Two places:
-‘The Week’ mentioned in the OP recommends books in their weekly newsletter which available free as an RSS feed.
-Powell’s Books (great in any number of bookish ways) has a newsletter and a daily book review available through e-mail or RSS feed. Seriously this is a wonderful source of finding interesting books and buying them. Powell's Books Blog
Bummer! I can’t use my Borders gift card to subscribe to Bookmarks.
You can just rock me to sleep tonight!
I’ll second goodreads.com There are some very nice recommendations there. I’m also a lifetime member of librarything.com
I took the 'depends what you mean by ‘good’ ’ as original snarkiness or at best unhelpful. When I say ‘good’ I mean ‘the opposite of bad’. Or to put it another way - 'such that it might end up in a list of books recommended by a source that is known for recommending books that people might like. In other words - for the purposes of this question it doesn’t matter what I define as ‘good’, what matters is the general meaning of ‘good’. The meaning of ‘good’ that makes a book end up on a well known source for recommending books.
I apologise if I read snarkiness in the original comment if none was intended.
AuntiePam
I more enjoyed the ride than the ending. I admit it was a bit weak. It’s been a few weeks since I finished it so I can’t remember exactly how it ended. I enjoyed the book but as you can see from this thread I may need to be exposed to more of what counts as ‘good’.
Other books I read having seen recommended are Cloud Atlas - which led to reading more excellent David Mitchell books. And The Ghost Map
I liked those books too. Two books don’t make book twins, but since you liked those two, I feel safe in recommending English Passengers by Matthew Kneale and The Last Hard Time by Tim Egan and The Great Mortality by John Kelly.
Something I do when a book tempts me but I’m not familiar with the author is read a few of the one-star reviews at Amazon. If the things the reviewer doesn’t like are important to me, I pass.
Well, I guess I’m still a little confused. One list might end up with Finnegan’s Wake on it, and another list might end up with The Wheel of Time on it, but both books aren’t likely to be on the same list, even though the folks making each list genuinely consider the books to be good. If I’m going to consider recommending a reviewer, it’s helpful to me to know something about the taste of the person to whom I’m making the recommednation. Do you think Finnegan’s Wake is good? Do you think David Eddings’s latest work is good? Are you partial to Cormac McCarthy? Joyce Carol Oates? Danielle Steele? Are you looking for recommendations of books that have been recently published, or for reviewers who will cover older books also?
“Good” as the opposite of “bad” just isn’t that helpful: it’s so subjective, and knowing what your perspective is is helpful.
But it looks as though other folks have a perspective useful to you here, so I’ll bow out.
Daniel
It’s Lobsang, Jake.
(And, BTW, my original response, though phrased snarkily, was sincere – I have been turned on to some seriously great books here, and every request for book suggestions that I’ve ever read has been met with an outpouring of knowledgeable advice, with commentary. A huge chunk of my Amazon wishlist has “sdmb” in the memo slot.)
I know that there is a lot that can be left to taste, but there are some books nearly everyone enjoys because of the quality of the writing and the depth of the plot. To Kill A Mockingbird might be one such. Most, the vast majority of books written, will never achieve “universally enjoyed” status, though of course they have their fans. The OP is not look for books “that have their fans” (Wheel of Time being the perfect example of one such) The OP is specifically looking for books that are nearly universally considered well-written or at least enjoyable. It’s not really that hard to understand.
Knowing the OP’s tastes would be helpful. For example, many people love <i>The Road,</i> but I consider it to be a stinking, derivative, flat turd of a book. If I were going to ask for book recommendations, I’d want to establish more about my reading preferences so that recommenders would be more likely to avoid anything similar.
Books like To Kill a Mockingbird don’t come along often enough to be recommended consistently by a periodical, IMO. A periodical can, at best, recommend things that meet the editors’ tastes. I enjoy the recommendations of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, for example. They confine themselves (for the most part) to fantasy and horror, but they define these genres very broadly, and they have very good taste within them. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever read any recommendation they’ve made that’s approached TKaM in quality. Books like that don’t come along every day.
Prose and plotting are two pieces that people look for–but even within those, there are different tastes. I often enjoy folks whose prose is highly stylized–Cormac McCarthy is wonderful, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland is a real nightmare of a treat. Other folks despise that sort of highly stylized writing; indeed, there’s a provocative essay somewhere online railing against exactly that sort of writing, in favor of a “transparent” style in which the prose wholly serves characterization and plot and never draws attention to itself.
Different strokes.
Daniel