Intelligent book recommendations
based on millions of connections.

Find your perfect book

New: Upload your exported goodreads library for quick recommendations »

A Book Like Foo is a book recommendation engine. It discovers books tailored to specific tastes and themes, selected from hundreds of thousands of titles. Often it will reveal unintuitive but accurate recommendations. It is not limited by the assumptions we generally make about what books we think people might like.

My name is James and I've been building and re-building this platform over five years, updating it yearly with new books, new tooling, and tweaking its backing algorithms. This site is purely funded by my own pocket, so I ask that, if you've gained any value from it, please consider donating on ko-fi.

Try searching for you own favourites and see what matches with your most-adored books.

Our current favourite searches

Specific tools to try out:

How does it work?

Entering the literary void: Characteristics of each book, genre, time periods, emotions, authorship, are used to create a query which is run against our database. This is where millions of relationships are found between around 200,000 books.
Path-finding your next binge read: The query travels through the database via those 'characteristics' paths that link all the titles together. It discovers “co-affections” – or similarites – that exist for your favourite books. From thousands of possibilities, it tells us which books are typically reviewed highly by readers that have also read your favourites.
Ranking and filtering: The paths found reveal a range of titles from all genres, which are ranked by characteristics like general popularity, themes, narratives and authorship. In the end you’ll find a specific order of results, with the first few being the most correlated with the books or themes you most adore.

Looking for some regular recommendations based on singular titles?

These are more traditionally discovered book recommendations gathered from the same rich dataset. They're still based on statistical "collaborative" insight and will reflect titles that readers of these books will find equally enjoyable. Here's a selection to get you started on your path of discovery:

Explore books by their themes and emotions: