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@bothwell
Giovanni's Room looks great, cheers! Will give it a read.
I do use Goodreads. I've found the recommendation system pretty ropy. It doesn't try to group books by any kind of internal similarity, just lets you sort them into shelves, and bases recommendations on shelf plus user rating. You need to get really granular with your shelves to get some use out of it. It's a little bit better if you look at the "people also liked..." lists on individual books, but it's variable. E.g. I always seem to get great recommendations on individual books for pop science, but terrible recommendations for sci-fi.
The goodreads rating system itself is pretty shit. Some people use it the way goodreads want you to use it (where 2 stars means you thought it was average). Other people use it the way most 5-star recommendation systems are interpreted (where 3 stars is average). So because not everyone is using the same system, you can't really trust the ratings.
Groups and lists are a bit better for discovery as they're curated and voted on by actual human beings and can be more thematically consistent.