About us

We’re a book discovery platform that analyses 100s of real reader discussions to find book recommendations and turn them into useful, carefully researched reading lists.

For every reader request, whether that’s a character, relationship dynamic, setting, trope, mood, or reading experience, our job is to identify the books readers can’t stop raving about and bring them to you.

But how exactly do we do this?

Currently, we have two mediums you can explore:

The FNFE Publication (aka the website you’re on right now)

This is where you’ll find articles where we share tailored reading lists around specific themes.

Right now, the publication is categorized into 3 columns:

The Shortlist

This is a column where we share reading lists of the most recommended books for every reader theme we cover.

What To Read When

In this column, we share custom reading lists that match our book recommendations to specific reader moments and requests.

Book Club Book Picks

This is our column where we build custom reading lists with book recommendations for various book club types and themes.

2The Reading Room

This is our paid offer.

Every Monday through Saturday, we send members an email catalogue of 30+ book recommendations around a specific reader theme.

This could be a genre, trope, mood, reader experience, etc.

Then on Sundays we send a recap of all the themes we’ve covered that week for members who need a refresher, roundup, or catch-up.

The Reading Room by FNFEGet 30+ book recommendations, delivered to your inbox six days a week.$7/month. Cancel anytime.

Take a look

Now you might be curious about how exactly we build our reading lists, so let’s talk about that.

Our methodology

How we find the books

Every list starts with a lot of digging.

For each theme, we analyse multiple independent reader discussions and gather the books people recommend across them.

Depending on the theme, that can leave us with hundreds or even thousands of individual recommendations to work through.

From there, we review those recommendations one by one.

We check that each person is genuinely recommending the book for the specific thing we’re researching, rather than simply mentioning it in the conversation. We also verify every book through our internal system to make sure we have the right title and accurate metadata.

Then we analyse the verified recommendations.

This allows us to see not just which books were mentioned, but how often readers independently recommended each one across the discussions we analysed. And that’s what we’re really looking for. We want to know which books readers themselves keep putting forward.

Once all of that research is brought together, we finally have enough evidence to put the top books into our internal book recommendation database for that specific theme or reader request. And this database is what powers the FNFE publication and every Reading Room newsletter.

Ps. You might have noticed that at the top of every reading list we have a tiny “How we made this list” note. Well, that’s a tidbit that shares the breadth of research that was undertaken to find the book recommendations in the specific list you’re reading.

Now, by this point it should go without saying; however, we’d like to spell out that:

Editorial independence

Our recommendations aren’t for sale

The books that make our lists get there because of the reader recommendation evidence behind them.

While FNFE may make money through advertising, sponsorships, and affiliate relationships, those commercial relationships do not influence which books we recommend in our reading lists.

Publishers, authors, advertisers, sponsors, and other commercial partners can’t pay to change those results.

Any paid book promotions, whether on our website or in a Reading Room issue, will always be clearly labelled as an advertisement or sponsorship.

A note from the founder

Hi, I’m Dami, the founder of Field Notes From Everywhere (and the person writing this About page).

Like most readers, I’ve often found myself scouring internet book communities for recommendations. And over the years, that has led me to some books I’ve loved, some spectacular failures, and a lot of time spent digging through conversations trying to find exactly what I was looking for.

Eventually, I started wondering why finding those recommendations had to be so much work. There’s no shortage of people talking about books online. And buried inside all those conversations are some genuinely great recommendations.

So, I decided to build the product I wished already existed. And thus, Field Notes From Everywhere was born.

I truly hope you enjoy these book recommendation lists as much as I enjoy creating them.