- 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.
We are working toward breaking even on costs while still adding new features. All the money we raise goes toward those costs, which are quite lean. I've worked on this project since Dec 2020 for free, plus put a LOT of my own savings into it :)
Hope that helps, and I am happy to answer questions, and more on our mission for readers and authors -> https://building.shepherd.com/
The ads on the books-like page are clearly marked, a different color, and they are partly how we fund being alive. If we had ~3,000 members, we could remove them. Currently, we have around 800.
no ties to my other accounts would be ideal from my perspective
i understand that it’s easier to get a stronger “trust” signal by being more invasive
but hopefully the product will be so valuable that users will value their accounts as assets (like on hn) that they won’t want to compromise with bad behavior
The problem is authors will sign up for fake accounts to vote for their own books, so having an email with each account is a big trust factor that helps us a bit.
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!
On mobile it took me three tries to find how to get from "Dungeon Crawler" to "Books Like Dungeon Crawler Carl" - you might consider surfacing those lists outside the "what is this book about" collapsible.
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!
We are working to do it based on frequency as part of the bigger app we are building right now. And show that. I'm hoping we might get that in this for next year.
I put in Translation State by Anne Leckie and at first glance the recommendations looked good. But at a closer look, what I was getting was "female scifi authors". Exclusively female. And as I scrolled down, the "scifi" part got dropped and it was just female authors of all kinds. So apparently the only recommendation worthy thing about this book is the author's gender.
So Anne Leckie's books have only been picked once by someone for their 3 favorite reads (a small number of votes). You can try that here:
https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025
We don't know the authors' genders or anything like that. Maybe you searched the entire website and then ended up on a book recommendation list? What is the URL you are at?
We have about 12,000 author-created book recommendation lists; they are deeply personal and may include gender.
I have no idea, I clicked on the search icon at the top, then typed "translation state" and then opened the first result. It didn't look like a handpicked list, I assumed I was getting the algorithmic recommendation.
If I'd seen a page titled "Susan's List of favorite female scifi authors" or something like that, it would be fine. But the page didn't look like I was on a handpicked list, there was not much to differentiate it from other pages.
These days I generally use LLMs as a universal recommendation engine. I put together a list of things I like from a category and ask “What is missing?”
Or sometimes I’ll input some of my blog posts and personal essays or even just copy and paste a huge chunk of my hn submissions and comments, and ask it to recommend books that would appeal to this person.
The embodiment of “don’t judge a book by its cover” lol.
IMO it’s cleaner to have the cover and then click into to read the description. But I do see your point, more information density can improve the overall UX flow.
So far, we only have ~5,000 votes for ~15,000 books over 2023 to 2025. We are still small but growing fast. Any chance you would share your 3 favorites this year and help us grow?
We are working on doing this on a much bigger scale and building a beta now too.
Sorry, nobody has picked one of his books as one of their 3 favorite reads of the year yet. We only have ~15,000 votes so far, but as we get more, that number will increase. We are working to improve this in 2026 as we grow.
We do have this if you want to see books like Glen Cook's:
one of my perpetual quests is more books like "dreamsnake", so I was definitely disappointed not to see it in there (it's an older book, but it did win both the hugo and the nebula)
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.
Recommended this to a friend who hates keeping track of "how many" kinds of things, and was dismayed at having to say how many books they've read (which they really don't want to do) and found they couldn't skip that question.
Yeah, sorry, it was on my list to make optional or remove this year, but I didn't have time. It is on there, and I'll see what I can do tomorrow.
The original idea was that we should weight votes more if someone has read 50 or 100 books, since their 3 favorites might receive a higher vote than someone who has read 12. Rough idea that we haven't tested yet on the data.
Dungeon Crawler Carl has been on my TBR for some time. But your review saying it’s like Always Sunny made me want to read that next. I love the dark humour in that series.
It is so good :), this one is a bit more absurdist, I think, but equally dark. I read them over 2 weeks last Christmas. I hope they are a match for you!
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.
We are working toward breaking even on costs while still adding new features. All the money we raise goes toward those costs, which are quite lean. I've worked on this project since Dec 2020 for free, plus put a LOT of my own savings into it :)
Hope that helps, and I am happy to answer questions, and more on our mission for readers and authors -> https://building.shepherd.com/
The ads on the books-like page are clearly marked, a different color, and they are partly how we fund being alive. If we had ~3,000 members, we could remove them. Currently, we have around 800.
tying this data to a login instead of a pure cookie model like hn seems dangerous.
This feature doesn't require a login; you just put in the book/author you love, and it returns matches.
If you want to vote, you'll need to log in. We needed substantial protection around the votes, and this was the easiest way to do so.
Would you want a magic link that sends you a url to vote to your email or something like that?
well hn allows voting without email
Ah, I see, you want to be able to create an account without an email?
Can you confirm that is what you prefer?
We have to screen very carefully for fraud from overzealous authors, unfortunately. Email is a nice tool in that.
no ties to my other accounts would be ideal from my perspective
i understand that it’s easier to get a stronger “trust” signal by being more invasive
but hopefully the product will be so valuable that users will value their accounts as assets (like on hn) that they won’t want to compromise with bad behavior
The problem is authors will sign up for fake accounts to vote for their own books, so having an email with each account is a big trust factor that helps us a bit.
I'll think on it :)
maybe an account has to build up cred or investment to be more trusted like on hn
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!
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.
Yep, the full app will use negative ratings as much as positive :)
On mobile it took me three tries to find how to get from "Dungeon Crawler" to "Books Like Dungeon Crawler Carl" - you might consider surfacing those lists outside the "what is this book about" collapsible.
Yep, I'm working on that, and thank you, good feedback :)
If you want to try the new feature go here though: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025
And from there you can get recommendations from people who loved DCC as one of their 3 fav reads of the year.
Smar issue, I ended up typing the name into the search engine. There should be a button adjacent to the book name.
Can you explain a bit more? I'd love to fix it -> ben@shepherd.com
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!
I'm surprised too, as that is one I overlap on :)
We are working to do it based on frequency as part of the bigger app we are building right now. And show that. I'm hoping we might get that in this for next year.
On the broader site, we do have "books like" Kingkiller Chronicles, and it does them based on the frequency they are associated together in the lists by humans: https://shepherd.com/books-in-order/the-kingkiller-chronicle...
(funny enough, the most recommended book alongside Kingkiller is Mistborn)
And Mistborn here: https://shepherd.com/books-in-order/mistborn/books-like
So we take the 12,000 book lists authors have made, and use that to generate these.
What do you think?
You overlap with my antifavorites, if that counts.
I put in Translation State by Anne Leckie and at first glance the recommendations looked good. But at a closer look, what I was getting was "female scifi authors". Exclusively female. And as I scrolled down, the "scifi" part got dropped and it was just female authors of all kinds. So apparently the only recommendation worthy thing about this book is the author's gender.
So Anne Leckie's books have only been picked once by someone for their 3 favorite reads (a small number of votes). You can try that here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025
We don't know the authors' genders or anything like that. Maybe you searched the entire website and then ended up on a book recommendation list? What is the URL you are at?
We have about 12,000 author-created book recommendation lists; they are deeply personal and may include gender.
For example, Ryan Southwick did a list on the best sci-fi books that broke the mold: https://shepherd.com/best-books/science-fiction-that-broke-t...
I have no idea, I clicked on the search icon at the top, then typed "translation state" and then opened the first result. It didn't look like a handpicked list, I assumed I was getting the algorithmic recommendation.
If I'd seen a page titled "Susan's List of favorite female scifi authors" or something like that, it would be fine. But the page didn't look like I was on a handpicked list, there was not much to differentiate it from other pages.
Gotcha, sorry I don't know that one but we have 12,000 lists by authors I've interviewed over the last 5 years.
Here is an example: https://shepherd.com/best-books/sci-fi-fantasy-historically-...
We try to make it really clear who picked them, who they are, and what they wrote.
What do you think?
These days I generally use LLMs as a universal recommendation engine. I put together a list of things I like from a category and ask “What is missing?”
Or sometimes I’ll input some of my blog posts and personal essays or even just copy and paste a huge chunk of my hn submissions and comments, and ask it to recommend books that would appeal to this person.
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.
The embodiment of “don’t judge a book by its cover” lol.
IMO it’s cleaner to have the cover and then click into to read the description. But I do see your point, more information density can improve the overall UX flow.
Looks like a cool idea, but I can't find my authors in there.
Ah gotcha, which ones are you looking for?
So far, we only have ~5,000 votes for ~15,000 books over 2023 to 2025. We are still small but growing fast. Any chance you would share your 3 favorites this year and help us grow?
We are working on doing this on a much bigger scale and building a beta now too.
I looked for Glen Cook[0], who is a well-known SF author for decades (and is still writing).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Cook
Nice, Black Company :)
Sorry, nobody has picked one of his books as one of their 3 favorite reads of the year yet. We only have ~15,000 votes so far, but as we get more, that number will increase. We are working to improve this in 2026 as we grow.
We do have this if you want to see books like Glen Cook's:
https://shepherd.com/books-in-order/chronicles-of-the-black-...
https://shepherd.com/search/author/10415
one of my perpetual quests is more books like "dreamsnake", so I was definitely disappointed not to see it in there (it's an older book, but it did win both the hugo and the nebula)
Yep we haven't gotten that one in our DB from anyone yet, eventually we will bring more books in as we grow :)
Right now the only way in is if someone picks it as a favorite.
Previous effort in this space:
https://www.literature-map.com/
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.
Recommended this to a friend who hates keeping track of "how many" kinds of things, and was dismayed at having to say how many books they've read (which they really don't want to do) and found they couldn't skip that question.
Maybe make it optional?
Yeah, sorry, it was on my list to make optional or remove this year, but I didn't have time. It is on there, and I'll see what I can do tomorrow.
The original idea was that we should weight votes more if someone has read 50 or 100 books, since their 3 favorites might receive a higher vote than someone who has read 12. Rough idea that we haven't tested yet on the data.
btw, we are working to remove this step as we speak, should be gone in a few days :)
Dungeon Crawler Carl has been on my TBR for some time. But your review saying it’s like Always Sunny made me want to read that next. I love the dark humour in that series.
It is so good :), this one is a bit more absurdist, I think, but equally dark. I read them over 2 weeks last Christmas. I hope they are a match for you!
I’d be glad to share my top 3 2025 reads but I’d like to do so without having to create an account or link to Google for authentication.
Yep, I've got a plan to eventually look at how we can do that, while still protecting the system from bots/spam (of which there are a lot).
It is a challenge. For now, we need it behind a login system. We try to make it as easy as possible, since most people have a Google account.