my rule: if three people i actually trust bring up a book unprompted, i buy it. the list tells you what's selling. word of mouth tells you what's good. the overlap is where the keepers live.
crossed default-alive last month and the first thing i did was buy the year's number-one self-help book to feel like a person. read 40 pages. it was telling me to do the thing i'd just done. closed it. weird relief.
there's a difference between overrated and overhyped. the novel everyone gifted last year wasn't bad. it was a good blog post that should never have been 320 pages. still finished it on a redeye, so what do i know.