Best-seller lists are not very useful for picking your next book. They tell you what is popular this week, not what is right for you this evening. After a while of buying books that everyone else is reading and not finishing them, it becomes clear that some other selection process would help.
Here are the three questions that work, in order.
1. What's been on your mind lately?
Not in a vague way — specifically. Have you been thinking a lot about a particular problem at work? About a person? About a place you want to visit? About a craft you keep returning to? The books that actually get finished are the ones that show up at the moment you happen to need them.
Take a minute and write down the actual thing. Then look for a book about that. The catalog search is good enough that a plain-English query like "deciding under uncertainty" or "writing well about ordinary things" will surface something honest.
2. What's the last book you didn't finish, and why?
If you abandoned a book, the reason you abandoned it is the most valuable piece of self-knowledge you have about your reading. Was it too theoretical? Too dense? Too long? Too dry? Too much like its own back-cover blurb?
Whatever the failure mode was, deliberately pick a next book that does the opposite. If you stalled on something academic, pick something narrative. If you stalled on something narrative-but-bloated, pick something short and precise. Books are not medicine — there is no rule that says you have to keep taking a dose that does not agree with you.
3. How much attention do you actually have right now?
This one matters more than the other two. A great book read at the wrong attention level just feels like a chore. If you have three small kids and a demanding job, a 900-page novel is a bad choice this month, no matter how good it is. Pick something that fits.
Generally:
- Twenty minutes a day → essays, short stories, slim non-fiction. Anything under 250 pages.
- An hour a day → most novels, most popular non-fiction, anything you've been "meaning to get to."
- A vacation → the long thing. The actual masterpiece. The Mann or the Mantel or the Knausgaard. Do not start it on a Tuesday.
Once you have an answer to all three questions, browse the catalog with them in mind. The right book usually picks itself in about thirty seconds.