If it’s not a famous book, you may find some Goodreads reviews and if you’re lucky a Reddit post or two, but not vasts amount of online discussion like you’ll find about any passingly good series or movie.
And if you love a movie or a tv show, it is much easier to convince people in real life to also watch it, since it’s way less time consuming and not everyone even reads books, but most people watch movies.
I just think that this really sucks about reading books.
Unless you’re both at the same part of the book/series, one of you will have gotten to some great part and want to share but can’t. I blazed through a space opera trilogy recently and my brother was reading it too. Thought that would be a great opportunity to share but he’s reading it alongside 6 other books and hasn’t gotten to the end of the first book, which is where the thing happens that really got me excited and made me burn through the other two books. So now I’m back to just being able to say “it’s good, you should read it” to people. By the time he gets there, I’ll be reading something else.
I feel like streaming culture has kind of divided people’s viewing habits in the same way. It’s more and more rare that EVERYONE is watching something at the same time and talking about it. Everybody is just watching whatever whenever and it’s making it more difficult to connect.