Hi HN,

Every year, we ask thousands of readers (and authors) to share their 3 favorite reads of the year.

Now you can enter a book/author you love and see what books readers loved who also loved that book/author.

Try it here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025

This goes wide and doesn't try to limit itself to the genre, so you get some interesting results.

What do you think?

Background:

I want better recommendations based on my reading history. I'm incredibly frustrated with what is out there.

This system is based on 5,000 readers voting on their 3 favorite reads from 2023 to 2025. So, this covers ~15,000 books and is a high-quality vote. We wanted to keep the dataset small for now while we play with approaches.

We are building a full Book DNA app that pulls in your Goodreads history and delivers deeply personalized book recommendations based on people who like similar books (a significant challenge).

You can sign up to beta test it here if you want to help me with that:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VOm8XOMU0ygMSTSKi9F0nExnGwo...

The first beta is coming out in late January, but it's pretty basic to start.

Past Show HNs as we've built Shepherd:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40084193

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38600246

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660

Thanks, looking forward to your comments :)

Ben

100 Books like Project Hail Mary (https://shepherd.com/books-like/project-hail-mary) :

- Travels with Charley : With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco.

- Invisible Women : Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.

then, if you love Andy Weir, you'll love this romance novel: The Duke's Christmas Redemption by Arietta Richmond

and then after scrolling through even more book recommendations I'm assuming are just ads:

Interested in time loop, philosophy, and time travel?

which is weird, because Project Hail Mary wasn't about time loops or time travel.

This is why I dislike recommendations on the internet anymore, it's just a cash grab to get some click through profit to amazon.

I'd be interested in a filtering feature where you could pick a book and disregard all data from anyone who has it listed as one of their favorites.

LibraryThing (https://www.librarything.com/home) has a nice feature where you can find people whose books have the strongest overlap as yours.

When I first entered all the books I thought I had read into LT, and clicked on the feature, the top match had several books by a completely different author. I had read many of his works and had totally forgotten to add them to my collection! It was magic!

Sweet, looking now to get some recommendations! I'm actually surprised more people don't have my two favorites overlapped more often (Mistborn and Name of the Wind)!

Question: when you don't search a book, it shows "Loved by X people", when you do, it shows "Book twins". I'd be really interested in seeing most frequently loved books, from people that like the book/books I'm searching. It would make it obvious I'm missing something!

Nice, I think you should try replacing the book cover images with a short synopsis of the book, as I find many of the book covers off-putting.

Previous effort in this space:

https://www.literature-map.com/

Looks like a cool idea, but I can't find my authors in there.

Btw, if you want to share your 3 favorite reads of the year, please share those here:

https://shepherd.com/bboy/my-3-fav-reads/login?next=/bboy/my...

You get a cool page like this:

https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025/f/bwb

I read ~130 books this year, and my 3 favorites of the year were:

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

I kept seeing recommendations for this book on Shepherd, but I was reluctant to try it. Many years ago, I tried a progressive fantasy book, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. This was a colossal mistake on my part because Dungeon Crawler Carl is AMAZING. This is one of the funniest and most beautiful books I have ever read. The satire is biting, and I love the characters from the bottom of my heart. If you love the TV show “Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” you will love the dark, absurd humor of this book. And this book isn’t all laughter; the characters often moved me to tears as they try to hold on to their humanity in the face of utter inhumanity and insanity.

The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter

One of my favorite concepts in the book is called a “misogi.” It is this idea of taking on one massive challenge each year, with a 50/50 chance of failure (don’t die is rule #1).

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

This book series is pure magic. It’s hard to put into words what Ken Follett has accomplished. I read a LOT of historical fiction, and I’ve never found another series that lets you live through history with characters you love, while also showing the sweeping forces that shape the world.

It makes for intense reading because you will experience the day-to-day reality of fighting for women’s right to vote in England or resisting the Nazi party’s slow takeover of Germany, and you do this through the eyes of characters you have grown to love. You feel what it is like on a daily basis, frustrated with the pace of change, and also just living the regular ups and downs of your life. It feels like the life you are living right now.

At the same time, you can see the big waves coming and want to scream at them to do more, even though they might not be able to do more. And sometimes you watch as the waves break over them without any warning or care. But throughout it all, you understand why these waves are happening with incredible clarity.