I often find it a minefield when I’m looking for books on history, particularly recent history. I’d love to find an impartial resource that can recommend great books to read on a particular topic.
Time is insanely valuable and I’d hate to waste it reading a book that’s uninformed, heavily biased or otherwise. Although I can of course see the merit in reading books in the same topic from different biases as long as they’re not playing fast and loose with the basic facts.
I tend to get interested in one particular topic for a while that I want to read about before switching to something else completely different. If I could cut down the anguish of searching for the best books on each topic it would be so helpful. I don’t have massive amounts of free time so I like to make the most use of it when it comes to reading.
Any advice on where to seek out the best books to read would be really helpful.
Hi there -- there isn't a single topic site like you're suggesting, but there are a few options for you if you're interested in a particular topic.
One is to pop something like "masters reading list US History" into Google, which will get you multiple results of collections of books that universities recommend on a topic (I'm using US History as an example, you can pop in your own choices of course).
Here's a result from that search: https://www.marquette.edu/history/reading-list-early-us.php Looking at that, it seems that it's a good comprehensive set of options based on what I did in my master's program and the reading I've kept up on.
You can also try aggregator sites like Goodreads - this list is ... fine, although it tends towards more pop-culture writers than historians per se (not that this is bad -- this can be your gateway drug into more historical writing).
Another option is that you can always consult the AskHistorians books list -- this is curated by the subreddit panel of historians and moderators.
You can always ask for book recommendations here if there's something you're interested in that's not covered above.
And finally, if you have access to a local library, that might be the quickest and best solution for you -- librarians exist to help people find resources of interest! I know that going to a physical building in a global pandemic is not ideal, but most libraries at this point have workarounds -- call them and ask for the research desk, and then ask your questions. If they don't have what you're interested in, they can generally get it through inter-library loan. And last, if you're within the region of a college or university, most university libraries allow community members some borrowing privileges -- it's worth asking.