By Melanie Pinola

How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List

How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List The days grow longer and the weekends more leisurely as summer approaches, making it a terrific time to catch up on reading. Whether your reading goal is to stimulate your mind, get lost in an adventure or romance, or learn something new, here are a few helpful tips for curating your perfect reading list this summer.

Before you jump straight into building your list, a few quick tips and considerations.

First, tackle your reading backlog: If you have books you've been meaning to read for ages but haven't gotten around to them, sift through your pile to make sure you still want to read each of them; purge the ones you honestly will never read but which may have been weighing heavily on you or preventing you from finding new books. If you still want to read the books in your pile someday, you may just need a broader mix of book genres—keep this in mind when building this year's reading list.
Look for the right types of books based on your available time: If you don't have a lot of time to read, consider looking for novellas, graphic novels, or collections of short stories, essays, or poetry. When searching for new books, you can filter for these book types. On the other hand, if you have a long summer vacation week coming up, add more engrossing or longer books to your list.
Tap your friends: When it comes to book recommendations, your friends are is a great bet. After all, they know you and share common interests.

If your friends aren't readers, or you'd like to branch out, you can find other like-minded readers via book recommendation engines and book trading sites, as well as online social networks and blogs (e.g., Lifehacker). Here's a look at your many options. Now on to the less obvious stuff that—hopefully—will yield you some great results.

Take advantage of social book sites

How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List Goodreads, a favorite book recommendation service, is known for its massive community of book lovers (5,100,000 and counting). The power of Goodreads depends largely on your friends (or contacts) being connected to the book service so you can browse their book lists and reviews. You can also, however, join online reading groups (e.g., Stephen King Fans), or browse the service's top shelves to find more recommendations. Goodreads' strength lies in its sheer volume; you're sure to find a group with reading interests to match yours.As with all public sites that have a large user base, however, the quality of the recommendations can vary as much as they do on Amazon product reviews.

How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List LibraryThing is an online book cataloging tool with extensive book lists and over a million members. LibraryThing excels at documenting your book collection—you can import from multiple formats, including your Amazon wish list, and view interesting stats, like number of awards won, about your books. The LibraryThing Zeitgeist of top books, authors, subjects, etc. is also pretty handy.

Because of its in-depth book analysis, you may find LibraryThing's recommendations to be spot-on. With only a handful of books added to my collection at first, LibraryThing suggested over 50 other very fitting books. Sure, several were from the authors of the books in my collection, but there was a great variety of books suggesting (all of which I had read or would want to read). Adding more books should definitely yield even better (or broader) —results.

Check out our roundup of the five most popular book recommendation sites for a few other alternatives to Goodreads or LibraryThing.

Use book-swapping sites to build your lists

Book-trading sites like BookMooch and Paperback Swap are also great sources of new—or, well, used—books. Other than using your public library, this is the cheapest way to add books to your reading list and get to read them for free.

The recommendation lists on these services—and your ability to get all the books—are more limited, however. They may be best for adding older books or less popular ones to your collection.

BookMooch's "most mooched books" shows you what people on the service are reading now. There's also an Amazon MoochBar that lets you use Amazon to find books you want then order it or add it to your BookMooch wishlist.

Paperback Swap has tools for searching books by tag and seeing popular book lists like NYT best sellers. A nice feature on PBS is that you can add a book to your wishlist and if a similar book (e.g., similar topic or different edition) becomes available, you'll be notified by email and given the chance to have it delivered to you.

Check out book recommendation search engines

How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List There are also sites specifically built to generate book suggestions based on the books or authors you input. What Should I Read Next? has over 75,000 titles in its databases so far and is pretty speedy. Some of the books I threw at it came up with no recommendations, but if the site doesn't find your book from the search form, you can enter the ISBN number. Registering on the service adds additional functionality previously noted, like building your book list, though avid readers will probably prefer LibraryThing for that sort of cataloging. What Should I Read Next? may be better for quickly finding books that are similar to a single title.

How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List YourNextRead has a more pleasant interface and some great features like a visual book map and the ability to connect to your Goodreads account. Searching for a book displays eight suggestions that you can recommend or disagree about the book being a good match. You can also reshuffle the selections, filter by genre, and add books to your saved lists.

How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List Similar to book recommendation search engines, you could also use Amazon's automatically delivered recommendations. Amazon's suggestions are based on your shopping and browsing trends. Their "customers who bought this also bought..." feature can yield good results (even if it's just there to sell more books). You might find something new and unexpected from those behaviorally-targeted lists.

Build your book list on the shoulders of giants

Speaking of book lists, another way to build your reading list—for this summer or for a lifetime—is by going through lists of great books that critics, authors, or scholars have curated. Robert Teeter's Great Books Lists is a master list of book lists. You'll find Harold Bloom's list of books for the Western Canon, Anthony Burgess' selection of the best 99 novels since 1939, the New York Public Library's Books of the Century, and many other book lists.

In hardcopy, check out For the Love of Books, edited by Ronald Shwartz, which features the most-loved books of 115 famous writers.

Find book recommendations from social networks and blogs

Social sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or sites with an active community of like-minded people (like Lifehacker) can also help you build a better reading list. A Mensa networking group on LinkedIn, for example, compiled this list of books members would recommend to anyone. And over 250 Lifehacker readers helped with the curating of this list of life-changing books.

Use your local library

Your local library is another excellent and often under-used resource. Specifically, take advantage of your local librarian—someone whose job is to recommend and help you find the right book(s). Help your librarian help you by coming in knowing your favorite authors, subjects, genres, or what your want to get out of your book selection. Some libraries' online sites also provide reading list recommendations and advanced services like Fiction Connection.

Explore, and be open to serendipity

Finally, don't discount pure luck. There's nothing like browsing a bookstore's shelves (or, better yet, bargain bin) and coming away with a new favorite author or book or two. (I discovered two of my favorite writers, Margaret Atwood and Mark Strand, at library book sales, taking a chance simply after reading a few passages).

How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List BookCrossing is another take on book sharing and serendipity. Label a book and leave it in a public place for others to pick up and read and do likewise—making the world your library. (Of course, this method is a little less reliable for building your book list, as it requires you to find books left by others. Those books are shared with joy, though.)

Creating, Sharing, and Reading Your List

Once you've found a great new book to read, add it to your reading list. This could be just a written checklist or an online virtual bookshelf like the one provided by LibraryThing. If you want to make sure you read your books, you could even add them as lists in your chosen to do application.

Since part of the joy of reading is sharing a good story, consider getting your friends involved in a summer reading club. You could create a shared doc with your book list(s) and even if you don't see your friends often or live far apart from them, send books in the mail.

Online, you could join a Kindle-lending site like previously mentioned Lendle to share your Kindle books with others. Remember also that if you use a social book-sharing or recommendation site, leave your comments about the books you finish, so other readers can benefit from your experience.

Finally, to increase your chances of actually reading these books, take them with you everywhere you go—for example, on the Kindle or Nook or smartphone apps, by leaving some books in your car, or even building a DIY handlebar bookstand for your exercise bike. Audiobooks are another useful way to fit more books into your day (e.g., while you commute).

Enjoy your summer of reading!

For more reading hacks, check out our top 10 tools for better reading online and off. What's on your reading list or how are you building your reading list this summer? We're all ears in the comments.

You can follow or contact Melanie Pinola, the author of this post, on Twitter