How to Pick the Right Book to Read

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Most people read less than ten books a year. With books being one of the most important and powerful ways we can learn, it’s important to make sure you’re reading the handful of books most likely to make a positive impact in your life.

Like anything else, picking the right book to read is a skill. You can learn how to do it and get better at it every time you pick a book. Here’s how.

Step 1: Identify a Topic

What have you been thinking about lately? When you’re on a Zoom meeting and google things in the other tab, what do you google? When you get hammered with your friends, what do you inevitably start talking about? These are the things that interest you. Start there.

Another place to start is with problems you constantly struggle with. What sucks about your life that you wish you could change? What problems with your own life or the world do you constantly dwell on? What questions do you wish you had an answer for, no matter how esoteric or vague? Start there.

Step 2: Find the Bestsellers For Your Topic

No matter what you want to read, there are bestsellers for your topic. If you want to explore how attentional control shapes the self, there are bestsellers for that. If you’re looking for metaphysical fairy fiction stories, there are bestsellers for that. Before looking at any other listings, look up the bestsellers for your topic.

Chances are, the bestseller itself will be what you’re looking for.

1. If the bestseller is not what you’re looking for because it’s too thick or unwieldy, search book listings for a shorter, more introductory version of that book.
2. If it’s not because it’s not informative enough, look up what books it uses as its citations and read those books. Usually, cited works are more specific, thicker, and more in-depth treatments of the same topic.

Step 3: Look at the Table of Contents

Sometimes, a book's description is too vague or too poorly written to help you understand what a book is about. The quickest and easiest way to truly get a sense of what a book is about is to look at the table of contents. Most of the time, authors break their book into well-named parts and sections, enabling you to look at chapter headings and quickly understand what a book is about.

Occasionally, though, this trick will fail because the author picked vague or “poetic” chapter headings. If this is the case, open to the beginning of one of the chapters and start skimming the text. Do this for two or three more chapters. This should quickly give you an idea of what the book is about.

Step 4: Look at the Reviews

Once you’ve figured out what a book is trying to sell you, figure out if the book can deliver on its promise. Books that have transformed the lives of others will be riddled with 5-star reviews. Books that have not transformed anyone’s lives will not have any reviews. (Books with negative reviews are “controversial,” meaning they’ve probably pissed people off more than they’ve transformed).

Step 5: Ask, “What Will Happen If I Read This Book?”

If you’re considering a nonfiction book, ask yourself what the intended outcome of you reading this book is. For instance, I want to read Intuition Pumps & Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett because I want to enhance my ability to think skeptically by studying what expert philosophers do to enhance their capacity for rationality. If Intuition Pumps ends up being about anything else or has a long and meandering quality to it, I will know I’m not learning what I want to learn and recognize it’s okay to put the book down.

If you’re considering a fiction book, you can do the same thing in framing your entertainment perspective. What kind of emotions do you hope this story will give you? What kind of story are you looking forward to reading? A good book will always surprise you, of course, but this helps you to understand whether it’s worth continuing to read a novel if you’ve already gotten a quarter of the way in.

This question is key to getting the most out of the books you read. There are many good books in the world, and it’s easy to pick a random book up and start reading and then keep reading because you started reading. Someone could easily waste an entire lifetime reading books that are okay but never quite getting around to the books she really wanted to read. If you’re continually asking yourself whether what you’re reading is what you want to be reading in the long run, you won’t make this mistake.

It’s easy to lay out the steps, but picking the right book also takes a bit of practice. To really know the value of what you’re picking, you have to know the entire book market; you have to be familiar with the kinds of books people tend to write, to be familiar with what your bookstore keeps in stock, and to be familiar with what is considered more “worthwhile” and what is less so. It takes time — and a fair amount of books — to get this sense of the market.

Once you have it, though, you have it. You’ll be able to tell at-a-glance how authoritative, in-depth, or well-regarded a particular book is, and as a result, you’ll always know how to get your hands on information when you need to know more about something. YouTube and Wikipedia make us think we’re well-informed, but most of the best knowledge is still locked away in books. Those who know how to find it are always sitting on a gold mine.

Want Great Book Recommendations?

If you want more great books, check out my ebook 5 Breakthrough Books That Will Change the Way You Think. It’s about five of my favorite books and how they might change your life.

Get 5 Breakthrough Books That Will Change the Way You Think here!