this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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The one downside to the library option that everyone is suggesting as someone who has been subscribed for a while is that if the book is popular, you only get it for a few weeks at a time.
I tend to read just a few pages at a time before bed, and I found myself struggling to finish books on time. Or a book I wanted became available during a week when I really wasn’t in the mood to read.
If it takes you more than two weeks to read a book, it might not be a good option for you. Though it is free to try.
Thanks! It did occur to me that KU is like a library, do maybe I should check mine. I'm in Los Angeles county, so I looked at the LA county library page. They have a lot of good titles, but everything in interested in reading at the moment has a long wait list. I'm not sure if there are better library options available to me.
I usually just look for what’s available now and start reading. Found a few good titles unexpectedly that way.
I did that for a while decades ago, and ended up reading a lot of stuff I thought was pretty crappy. Then I became friends with a coworker who was also a reviewer for Locus Magazine, and he started helping me pick his to read. The difference in my reading enjoyment was exponential. So now I'm more particularly, and pay a lot of attention to things like Hugo and Nebula award nominees.
Oh our library in Seattle has a service like that! You can list books you like, and the librarians will provide a human-picked list of suggestions.
Oh, that's a nice service as long as the people know their stuff more than "Well this is the same genre..."
From what I’ve heard, they’re very good. They even write a short description of why they selected each book.
Just wanting to echo the suggestion for linking the kindle to the library. It took a while but basically I just did a massive number of books I was partially interested in (>25) and got on the waitlist. If you then don't have time you can always defer and set the number of days to defer by (e.g. just a couple) but after only a month or so of reading new books I've had constant opportunities to read big name books over the year. There is also sometimes a special "skip the line" copy which can give you a bonus week reading early!
Okay, thanks
Thanks for mentioning this - I have a similar reading style to you and have recently been considering KU, so this is really helpful!