I never thought of that. Thanks, I’ll try it. I currently just use “read,” “want to read,” and “abandoned.”

The problem is if it's some obscure topic with a specific shelf, you can get some pretty bad books, as it seems to pull them based on other people's tags of books. Or, I can be reading academic works on Buddhism and then get recommended Alan Watts, who wasn't an academic and wasn't a Buddhist, but others tagged as 'Buddhism'. So there are still plenty of issues with it.

What does this mean?

When you finish a book you can review it, or assign shelves. The default shelves are to-read and read but you can add many custom ones too. The shelves work like tags. Once you have a decent amount of books with tags, goodreads will start recommending books based on these tags.

For example, if you have a 'non-fiction' shelf, goodreads will give you books others have rated high with the same tag at https://www.goodreads.com/recommendations/shelf/non-fiction

It's much more specific and for me works better than the 'because you read book X, you might like book Y' which is often very random.