The Best Books for When You Have No Idea What to Read Next

The thing about reading recommendations is that they're almost always wrong for at least half the people who receive them. Reading taste is genuinely personal in a way that film or music taste isn't quite – the relationship between reader and book involves a kind of intimacy that makes the same book a revelation to one person and profoundly boring to another, for reasons that aren't always predictable or explicable.

What I've tried to do here is give recommendations by mood and situation rather than by genre alone, with a note about what kind of reader each book works best for. These aren't necessarily the best books ever written. They're books I've found myself pressing on other people, which is a different standard.

When You Want to Be Absorbed Completely

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. A Russian count is placed under house arrest in a Moscow hotel in 1922, and the novel follows the next thirty-five years of his life within those walls. It shouldn't work – the premise sounds constraining – and it turns out to be one of the most involving things I've read in five years. Warm, funny, meticulously constructed. Genuinely difficult to put down.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. If this sounds like it might not be your sort of thing – gothic Barcelona mystery, lots of atmosphere, slightly melodramatic – I'd encourage you to try the first chapter anyway. It hooked me badly despite my reservations and I read it in two days.

When You Want Something That Makes You Think

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Climate change non-fiction that is not, somehow, despairing. It's clear-eyed and evidence-based and it changed how I think about quite a lot of things beyond its ostensible subject. Dense in places; worth the effort.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Yes, it's on every list. It's on every list because it's genuinely good. If you haven't read it, it remains one of the clearest explorations of how human decision-making actually works versus how we think it works. I re-read sections of it every couple of years.

When You Want Something Funny

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick is on the wrong list – it's actually a serious book about life in North Korea, but I keep recommending it here by accident because it reads with the pace and structure of a thriller and demonstrates what genuinely good non-fiction can do. Not funny, but compulsive in the same way a great novel is.

For actually funny: The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller. A book about a man who finally reads all the books he said he'd read. More self-deprecating and warmly honest than it should be, and very funny about the specific anxiety of unread books.

Short Fiction When You Don't Have Time for Novels

Short story collections get overlooked because they don't feel like an achievement to read in the way that novels do. Which is silly, but there we are.

Tenth of December by George Saunders is as good as everyone says. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is unusual and unsettling in the best way. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang – if you saw Arrival, this is the collection containing the story it was based on, and the other stories are just as thoughtful.

Comfort Reading That Isn't Embarrassing

Everyone has this category even if they don't call it that. Mine is Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series (start with Master and Commander) – naval fiction set during the Napoleonic wars that I cannot explain the appeal of but which I have read through three times. If historical fiction isn't your comfort reading, Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels have a similar "slip into a safe world" quality without requiring any interest in maritime history.

One Rule for Finding Good Books

Ask someone whose taste in other things you respect what they've read recently that surprised them. Not what they think you'd like – what surprised them. The surprise is the useful data point. Books that merely confirm existing tastes are pleasant; books that expand what you find pleasurable are rarer and more valuable.