[FreeHugs]

Reminds me of https://www.literature-map.com

Which is a map of all authors in the world sorted by overlap in readership. I found some of my favorite writers by browsing it.

I wonder which approach is better suited to find something that is spot on to my interests.

When I think of my favorite books, they usually are the most popular books of their authors.

Are there any counterexamples, where an author wrote a book that is more profound than their biggest hit but got overlooked for some reason?

[lkbm]

Oh man, Literature Map looks really great for finding recs.

That said, I do think book-level might be much more valuable. My first thought for this was Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. I haven't read anything else by him yet because my brother informs me his other stuff is entirely different. Looking at Goodreads, I think that qualifies as far from his biggest hit. Is it "more profound?"? Doubtful, but seems likely that you shouldn't group it with his others. I want recommendations based on the book I like, not the author I mostly might-not.

A better example might be how Stephenie Meyer wrote the extremely popular Twilight books, and also The Host which is much less well-known, and better in many respects. Probably qualifies as more profound, too—it's told from the perspective of a parasitic alien. Picture the Yeerks from Animorphs if you read those.)

[Tyr42]

I wish it was easier to see some of their books, or even copy and search the author from each page.

[xpil]

Whoa, this is a great resource. Never heard of it before, it looks like I'm finally able to get some proper book recommendations. Absolutely loving it.

Weird though that for certain cases it spells English author names with Cyrillic alphabet. Like for instance when I center the graph on "Stanisław Lem", I can see names like George Orwell or Terry Pratchett spelled in Cyrillic. I wonder why.

[niccl]

Stella Gibbons is basically only known for Cold Comfort Farm, but IMO many of her other things are better, although in a different way. My favourite is Pure Juliet, which is a beautifully gentle portrayal of someone who is on the Autism spectrum, written before Autism was really a thing that people talked about.

[aidenn0]

> Are there any counterexamples, where an author wrote a book that is more profound than their biggest hit but got overlooked for some reason?

Any reply is going to be somewhat subjective, but All Systems Red is not even in my top 5 books by Martha Wells...