What should you read next?
Not another 'trending' list. A read for you, right now.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
What you should read next depends less on your taste than on your current capacity. The right book for a depleted month is not the right book for a curious one, and most reading slumps are the result of reaching for the wrong shape. This works out what you need and names five or six specific books.
How it works
The quiz has 4 possible results. Each answer option was written to lean toward one of them.
Your result is the one your answers pointed to most often. Skipped questions, and the occasional answer that does not lean toward any result, are not counted.
Alongside the result you see your answer profile: the share of your answers that pointed to each result. Close percentages mean you sit between two results, which is common.
Four honest picks
Absorbing Novel
You need something that won't let you go, and the reason you're not reading is that nothing has gripped you.
Restless, decent concentration once something takes hold, evenings available if a book earns them, and a phone that loses to a good one. Your last abandoned book was something slow. What would count as success is reading past midnight. Read these: Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Tana French's In the Woods, which is crime fiction written better than most literary fiction. Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, which begins a quartet if it works. Sarah Waters's Fingersmith. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. What to avoid this month: anything described as a meditation, and anything you're reading because you feel you should. Your appetite is real and specific, and the failure mode is choosing something worthy that stalls at page sixty and puts you off for a season.
Book That Explains Something
You're curious rather than depleted, and what you want is a book that makes something click.
Good concentration, commutes and lunch breaks, reading articles instead of books, and prose that should be clear rather than beautiful. You want a book that explains something you keep half-understanding, and success would be understanding it properly. Read these: Robert Caro's The Power Broker if you want the biggest version. Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers. James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy. John McPhee's Annals of the Former World for how the form can be written. Svetlana Alexievich's Second-hand Time. How to choose: pick the subject you've read three articles about, since that's where a book will pay off most. And prefer reporting and history over argument, because books that argue a thesis age faster and tend to be the ones you don't finish.
The Short and Beautiful
You're depleted, and the right book right now is one that asks very little and gives a lot.
Poor concentration, twenty sporadic minutes, the phone winning in the evening, falling asleep after a few pages, and an abandoned book that was too demanding. Success would be finishing anything at all. That's a capacity problem, not a reading problem, and the answer is a shorter book rather than more discipline. Read these: Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These, which is about a hundred pages and as good as anything. Denis Johnson's Train Dreams. Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation. Natalia Ginzburg's The Little Virtues. Ali Smith's There but for the. Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor. Practical: read in the morning rather than at night if you can, since evening reading is competing with your worst hour. Poetry and short stories are worth considering, because finishing one thing restores something that a half-read novel takes away. And give yourself permission to reread something you love.
Long Companion
You're settled, patient, and you want a book to live with rather than finish.
Months available, eight hundred pages happily, difficulty welcome given time, and a shelf of big ones you're saving for the right stretch. What would count as success is something you'll think about for years. You're the reader most publishers wish existed in greater numbers. Read these: George Eliot's Middlemarch, if somehow not. Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead sequence. Halldor Laxness's Independent People. Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time if you want twelve volumes of company. How to read them: slowly and daily rather than in bursts, since long novels reward a steady relationship more than a sprint. Keep a second short book alongside for the nights you can't face it. And start the one you've been saving, because the perfect stretch of clear time doesn't arrive; you just begin.
What this quiz can’t tell you
- It matches you on the preferences you report, so the result is only as good as the options offered. Your real favourite may not be among them.
- Taste shifts with mood and season. Treat the result as a suggestion to try, not a verdict.
How this quiz was designed
Built around current capacity and appetite rather than genre preference.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.