Recommendations, from friends and from the internet. Very rarely do I just go to the bookstore and pick out books to buy, although sometimes I will do so for authors I already know I like.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Look at the pamphlets that the book club sends out, walk around in B&N, or something that catches my eye on amazon.
While I’m in the middle of a book I keep an eye on “Whatcha reading?” threads, ask my friends what they are reading and in general make a note of a book that sounds interesting if I see or hear it discussed elsewhere. I have a notepad file on my PC that has a big list of books I’ve found this way. Once I’m finished my current book I go through the list and check them out on Amazon. I always read the “look inside the book” section and decide from there.
Although sometimes I don’t really feel like trying something from my list and will just walk into a book shop and judge the covers. Although I always read a couple of pages before buying. I never read the blurb as they tend to give too much away.
From a blank slate I go by authors I like and what other people with similar tastes are talking about.
For the past few years I’ve been doing that less because on a whim about two years ago I decided that as an SF fan I had only read the smallest fraction of the award winning SF. So I embarked on a reading project to read all of the Hugo winning novels in order. Once I was done with that I said to myself, “Hey, there’s only a dozen or so books that didn’t win both Hugo and Nebula; I really should read all of those too.” And so I did. And now because it’s a thing I’m doing I’m working my way through all of the World Fantasy Award winners and there’s a couple of other reasonably major awards to go.
Yeah, it’s not all of the Pulitzer winning novels or authors who have won the Nobel prize for literature but I think I’m having more fun…
I don’t know anyone else who reads a lot of the same things I do, so I rarely get recommendations except from here, actually. I generally know what I’m going to like, and have several authors whose work I haven’t exhausted yet. Amazon’s recommendations are occasionally useful for introducing someone new, but I’ve rarely bought something based only on one of those recommendations.
For picking books, I’ve learned not to necessarily let a cover sway me too much. Of course, good cover art or design will definitely influence me to check out a book, but I have learned that genre fiction in particular feature horrible covers on great books. The cover for Dave Duncan’s Gilded Chain looks like a bad historical romance, which is very much not like the story; he skews the tropes of heroic fantasy, introduces an interesting magic system, hands out some pretty brutal consequences for his characters, and makes you deal with fully developed characters who have both admirable and sometimes revolting qualities. L.E. Modesitt is a decent writer, long on interesting ideas that show the relationship between economics and natural resources, short on characterization. His covers range in quality depending on the series from pretty darn good to absolute crap. And who would have bought Pet Sematary with this cover if they didn’t already like Stephen King?
(BTW, two places featuring bad book covers: Judge a Book and Bad Book Covers. For some nice ones, The Book Cover Archive.)
I rarely buy books from an unknown online. I have to browse through and read a couple of pages at least. A good book will grab me. A bad one will probably kill my interest within a couple of paragraphs.
I used to like back cover synopses as a quick way to screen for elements I might either like or wish to avoid, but those seem to have disappeared in favor of “praise” from reviewers. Cover blurbs are a source of amusement. I sometimes play a game of making up a longer, very negative, quote from the short version on the cover.
Original: “Amazing!” --New York Times
My version: “I can’t believe someone didn’t take this author’s manuscript and use it as toilet paper, except that if they had, their great grandchildren would still have some pages left to line the bird cages. Over a thousand pages of absolute drivel, and yet you mouth breathing unicorn-and-rainbow fantasy lovers will still buy the other eight volumes in this never to be finished series. Amazing!”
The magic of selective quotation; it turns anything, whether negative or positive, into pap. Amazing! Yeah, one word reviews are going to make me buy the book :rolleyes:
Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of people say that about Wheel of Time.
I rely on Amazon.com reviews and recommendations, and sometimes Entertain Us Weekly magazine’s tiny book review section will feature something that sounds interesting. I look up my favorite authors on my library’s looker-upper-thing and when they have something new coming out I put my name on the ‘reserve’ list. But I do love to go to a bookstore and just look around and flit from psychology to mysteries to recipe books to non-fiction…I seldom come out of a bookstore without something. Before Waldenbooks folded, I got a wonderful book about kitties! And a new Leonard Maltin TV movie review book. And another Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
Online, I rely on Amazon’s recommendations. Browsing in a bookstore, it’s more about visually appealing spines (appealing enough to pull it off the shelf and read the dust jacket teaser), or a clever, strange or intriguing title.
I’ll buy from the remainder tables; I’ve found a lot of first novels by writers I like that way.
I avoid anything with a blurb that mentions ‘lyrical prose’; lyrical prose means ‘piss poor plot’.
You can have “lyrical prose” without being an aimless set of digressions by a wordsmith in love with the sound of their own voice… it’s just that the people who write blurbs feel less need to comment on the prose when the other elements match it.
I promise to not automatically write off any work you say has lyrical prose.
Oh my God, there is actually a book titled Motive: Secret Baby! What the heck does that even mean? That was the hardest I’ve laughed in a while, though. 
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris