I spent a lot of time reading “junk books.” Like junk food, these books were sometimes good, most of the time bad, and always unfulfilling.

Reading takes up so much free time, but it’s important to stay well-rounded, and I do enjoy it, so I decided to try to find a way to maximize my return on investment.

If I’m going to read something, why not read the best thing? In fact, why read anything until I’ve already read everything better first?

But how do you decide what is the best book? Well, luckily lots of smart people read books, and they all have opinions they’re willing to share.

In fact, as is the case most of the time, a fellow developer already had the same idea and did all the work for me. The best part is, he wrote it in Rails (high five!).

At thegreatestbooks.org you can find a list that combines hundreds of “greatest books ever” lists. To me, this is the best way to objectively find out what the next best book you haven’t read is and go read it.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for a little over a year now. The site continues to add more lists and as a result the overal rankings change every so often. You can follow updates to the knowledge base on the accompanying blog.

Thanks to the developer that makes this service available: Shane Sherman. I’m definitely reading more and getting more out of what I read because I don’t spend weeks trying to decide what to read next and everything is of supreme quality.