The first, and least likely to work, is to use the moderation interface instead of the question interface
@Cindy First, this means somehow forcing users to vote to close as "other" on something they have been educated is "too broad", and users don't go with such suggestions normally. They typically even resist the more obvious categorizations.
So in practice, even if we ask them to do that, it's unlikely that they will do it.
And second, why is consistency important?
Back to the solution list, for completeness: 2.x can be about ideas similar to the election functionality. I am certain the team won't let us use the actual question type for that, but maybe somebody will use it as an inspiration. I can't come up with any good ideas about that, but I'm reserving the number for completeness
Then 3: there is the voting on community ads
It seems to work more or less
It employs a strict format of having 1) a single suggestion per answer, and 2) a single picture in the answer body, zero text. So even a list of 30 of them at once is quite scannable.
I think that we can emulate this by using 1 book title per answer and nothing else
so 3.1: a question with multiple answers, each of them kept to a single book title. Extra info can go into comments, but not into the main body.
The curator will have to be a moderator who can delete duplicate entries
If we choose this option, I can take the role of being the curator
The next solution: do away with the question completely
3.2 make community ads instead of a question
a community ad can endorse whatever resource we like, not just a site
we can make a community ad about a book, about a blog, whatever.
so we can simply start putting our favorite books into the Community ad thread and they will start appearing on the side bar once they get enough upvotes
It will require the author put in some work of creating the image
but I think this is actually good, because one of the problems of "big list" is that it is way too easy to add one more answer where there are already too many good ones
increasing the friction of adding an answer will help with that
The third thing to emulate will be the Photography thread for header picture selection
Each month, they open a new thread in Meta for beautiful photography
they post one picture per answer
and the highest voted one ends up in their header