Picking a new book on your own is a bit like walking blind into a movie theatre. More often than not, you walk out carrying the quiet disappointment of wasted time and regret. With books, the stakes are even higher—a bad film costs you an evening, but a bad book can cost you weeks and, worse, can put you off reading altogether.
Find the Reviewers Who Read Like You
The single most important step in choosing a book is not browsing bestseller lists or scanning ratings. It is identifying readers and reviewers whose interests genuinely overlap with yours—and then letting them do the filtering for you.
Think about it: a reviewer who has read three hundred books in your areas of interest has already made the mistakes you would otherwise make.
My own reading gravitates towards politics, philosophy, economics, technology, spirituality, business, and self-development. Some of these interests are reflected in the readers below:
- BookLab by Bjorn (booklabbybjorn.com/great-books-list) — a carefully curated collection of outstanding nonfiction books organised around philosophy, psychology and human nature, self-improvement, economics, the future of technology, practical life skills, and spirituality—subjects that closely align with some of my interests.
- Bill Gates Notes (gatesnotes.com/books) — Bill Gates reads widely across technology and AI, science, climate and energy, global health and development, and economics and public policy. His recommendations come with thoughtful, honest commentary rather than promotional fluff.
Beyond these, there is a growing ecosystem of serious book reviewers on Instagram and YouTube. Not all of them are worth following—many simply chase whatever is trending—but if you invest a little time in finding two or three whose tastes consistently match yours, you have effectively hired a personal reading scout, free of charge.
The test is simple: go back through a reviewer’s past recommendations. If you have already read and enjoyed several of the books they praised, their filter works for you. If their five-star picks leave you cold, move on and find someone else.
“Are Books Still Relevant in the Age of AI?”
I get this question often—more than ten people have asked me some version of it: Why read an entire book when GPT can summarise it in thirty seconds, or when so many content creators do it in reels?
Here’s the thing: fast access to condensed knowledge is not new. If you visited a library regularly in the pre-AI era, you’ll remember the index cards, the abstracts, and the digests. Reviews and summaries were widely available long before chatbots existed—and long before reels. The condensed format has always been there, in one shape or another. And yet people kept reading full books because a summary and a book do entirely different jobs.
There’s also a practical point about how today’s AI actually works. To get anything out of GPT, you have to ask. We are not yet in the era of truly agentic AI that senses your circumstances and feeds you what you need, unprompted. Until then, the knowledge just sits there—inert—waiting for the right question. And knowing what to ask is itself a skill that only deep reading builds. The paradox of the AI age is this: the less you read, the less you know what to query.
Why Summaries Don’t Stick
Here’s a simple experiment. Ask someone who consumes most of their “knowledge” through reels, stories, and short-form summaries a simple question:
Can you recall one piece of wisdom you learned from all that content—something you actually apply in your life?
Watch what happens. Head-scratching. Humming. Silence. In my experience, almost no one can name a single piece of wisdom they truly remember and have actually applied.
The reason is not that the content was bad. The reason is that humans learn through repetition and patterns. A writer’s real job is to take a single idea and reinforce it through stories, examples, arguments, and different perspectives until it becomes part of your mental framework. That process is what makes the idea available to you months or even years later, when a real situation calls for it.
A thirty-second summary delivers the conclusion without creating that mental imprint. You nod, you scroll, and it’s gone.
The Attention Cost of Short-Form Media
There is a second, quieter cost: what short-form visual media does to our attention spans. A book demands hours of sustained focus. That demand is not a flaw—it is precisely the mechanism by which your brain forms memories, makes connections, and builds durable patterns of thought.
Reels and stories work in the opposite direction. They provide a quick dopamine hit before disappearing almost immediately while training the brain to expect stimulation every few seconds. The more you consume, the harder deep focus becomes—and the more you need what only books provide.
The Subconscious Dividend
One last thing: every book changes you, even when you don’t notice it.
You finish a book, forget most of the specifics, and assume it left nothing behind. Then, months later, while facing a difficult decision or a problem, an idea surfaces from somewhere—a perspective, an instinct, or a caution—and you realise it was planted by something you once read. Books work quietly beneath conscious awareness, compounding in the background of your thinking.
Reading and writing are among the defining acts of human civilisation. No other species preserves its accumulated wisdom in this way, passing it from one generation to the next. That alone is reason enough to cherish books and make them a permanent part of life.
Summarised
- Define your interests based on your field and personal curiosity—for example, politics, philosophy, economics, technology, spirituality, business, and self-development.
- Find two or three trusted curators whose reading history overlaps with yours, along with a few reviewers on YouTube or Instagram whose recommendations you’ve verified against books you’ve already enjoyed.
- Let them filter; you decide. Their shortlist becomes your starting point.
- Read the full book, not just the summary. The repetition is the point.
- Trust the compounding. Even the books you think you’ve forgotten are still shaping the way you think.
Choose your reviewers well, and you’ll rarely walk out of the theatre with regret.
