I’m Cristina Mella, and I chase down what people actually read.
This started as a private annoyance. I’d hear someone I admired mention a book in passing on a podcast, forget the title by the time I got home, and go looking for it. What I found instead were dozens of pages listing “their favourite books” — confident, tidy, ranked, and sourced to absolutely nothing. No episode number. No interview. No date. Just a list that had clearly been copied from another list, which had been copied from a third.
Some of those lists were fine. Some contained books the person had never mentioned in their life. The maddening part is that from the outside you cannot tell which is which.
So I started keeping my own notes, with the source attached to every entry. That’s all this site is: those notes, cleaned up and made public.
What I actually do
For each person, I go looking for moments where they named a book themselves — an interview, a podcast episode, a talk, a published list, a post from an account I can verify. When I find one, the book goes on their page along with a link to that source, so you can check my work in one click.
When I can’t find a real source, the book doesn’t go on the page. This is the whole point, and it’s also why my lists are sometimes shorter than the ones you’ll find elsewhere. A page here with eleven books means I found eleven I could stand behind — not that the person has only ever read eleven books.
I’ve written up the full standard on the how I verify page.
What I get wrong
Plenty, probably. Sources go dead. Podcasts get re-numbered. Someone recommends a book in 2011 and disowns it in 2019. A quote gets attributed to the wrong person and I don’t catch it.
If you find a mistake, I want to hear about it — genuinely, not as a politeness. Corrections are the only thing keeping a project like this honest. The same goes for recommendations I’ve missed: if you know of a source where someone named a book and it isn’t on their page, send it over and I’ll add it with the citation.
You can reach me at [email protected].
How this site pays for itself
The book links here are Amazon affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission if you buy through them. It costs you nothing extra.
I want to be precise about what that does and doesn’t influence, because on most sites it influences everything. It does not affect which books get listed — a book is on a page because I found a source for it, and there is no version of this where a bigger commission gets a book added. There’s no “sponsored pick” here and there never will be. The full terms are on the disclosure page.