How to choose your next book: five questions that beat a bestseller list

Most of us choose books badly. We pick what's on the front table, what a friend mentioned, or whatever has four point something stars, and then we wonder why a third of what we start never gets finished. The problem usually isn't the book. It's that we asked the wrong question when we picked it up.

“Is this book good?” is the wrong question. Thousands of good books would be wrong for you this week. The useful question is: will this book suit me, now? That breaks down into a handful of smaller questions, and you can answer every one of them before you read page one.

1. What do you want to feel?

Start with mood, not genre. “I want something cosy” or “I want to be properly unsettled” tells you far more than “I want fantasy”. Fantasy includes gentle tea-shop stories and thousand-page wars where everyone you like dies. The shelf label won't separate them. The mood will.

Be honest about where you are. If you're exhausted, a dark book that would thrill you on holiday can feel like a chore. If you're restless, a cosy one may bore you. There's a longer guide to this in reading by mood.

2. How much attention do you have?

Pace and weight decide whether a book fits your life right now. A slow burn pays off through accumulation. It needs long sittings and it punishes you for reading in five-minute gaps. A fast-pacedbook carries you along even when you're tired. Weight works the same way: a heavy, literary book asks for more of you than a light, escapist one.

None of these is better than the others. They suit different weeks. A lot of abandoned books were the right book at the wrong time.

3. How long have you got?

Length is a commitment, and people underrate it. If you're in a slump, a short bookyou finish beats a brilliant long one you don't, because finishing gives you momentum. If you're starting a long book, check its pace first. Seven hundred fast pages and seven hundred slow ones are very different undertakings.

Check whether it's a series, too. A book that ends on a cliffhangeris a problem if the sequel isn't out yet. A standalone lets you walk away satisfied.

4. What do the books you loved have in common?

This is the most useful question, and the one people skip. Take the last five books you gave five stars and ask what they share. Usually it isn't genre. It's something underneath, like a certain mood, a pace, a kind of ending, or a theme you keep coming back to without noticing.

That pattern is the best predictor of what you'll love next. It's more reliable than bestseller lists or average ratings, because it's about you. There's a step-by-step method in finding your reading taste in your own ratings.

5. How much risk do you want?

Every choice sits somewhere between a safe bet and a gamble. The safe bet is another book that matches your pattern exactly: you'll probably like it, and it probably won't surprise you. The gamble is a book that differs from your pattern on one or two dimensions. It might become a new favourite, or it might not work for you at all.

Both are good strategies, and the best readers alternate. The idea has a name in statistics, and there's a whole guide to it: explore or exploit.

Putting it into practice

You can answer the first three questions in ten seconds, and they'll rule out most of what's in front of you. The problem is that book listings rarely tell you the answers. A blurb describes the plot. It doesn't tell you the pace, the weight, or how the book ends.

That's why every book page on this site spells them out. Each of the books Match Book has read shows its mood, pace, tone, length and ending style, plus the six books that read most like it. Pick a collectionthat matches your answers and you'll have a short list in a minute.

The fourth question takes longer to answer by hand, and that's what the Match Book app does. Import your Goodreads library and it reads your five-star books across fifteen dimensions, shows you the pattern, and finds books that fit it. It can also bend the pattern on purpose when you want the gamble.