The Problem of Choice
There are approximately 130 million books in existence. More than 4 million new titles are published every year. The average person will read perhaps 3,000 books in a lifetime. This means you will read approximately 0.002% of all books ever written. Every book you choose is a book you are choosing instead of 43,000 others. The stakes are higher than they seem.
The good news: the problem of choosing well has been solved — not by any single critic's taste, but by the aggregate wisdom of hundreds of editorial sources. That is what our database is designed to provide.
Strategy 1: Follow the Editorial Consensus
Our database scores every book against 40+ independent editorial sources — prizes, critic surveys, cultural polls, and academic anthologies. A book with a high aggregate score has been independently recognised by multiple sources across decades. This is the most reliable predictor of quality available.
Start with our Rankings page, which lets you sort by score, genre, country, and decade.
Strategy 2: Read Prize Winners
Literary prizes are imperfect, but they are the single most efficient way to find quality books. If you read every Booker Prize winner from the last decade, you will have read ten excellent novels. If you read every Pulitzer Prize winner, you will have a comprehensive education in American literature.
We track every major prize in our database. See our Award-Winning Books of 2026 guide.
Strategy 3: Follow Authors, Not Trends
When you find an author whose work resonates, read everything they have written before moving on. This is how you develop taste — by going deep rather than wide. Our author pages show every ranked book by each author, making it easy to explore a writer's full body of work.
Strategy 4: Explore by Country
Most readers read primarily from their own literary tradition. Branching out geographically is the single most effective way to expand your reading horizons. Our Browse by Country section covers 200 nations. Try Japanese literature if you have never read it. Try Nigerian literature. Try Argentine literature. You will be astonished by what you have been missing.
Strategy 5: Use the 50-Page Rule
Give every book 50 pages. If it has not engaged you by then, quit without guilt and start something else. Life is too short for books that do not earn their pages. This is not a failure of discipline; it is the efficient allocation of a scarce resource (your reading time).
Strategy 6: Alternate Genres
Do not read three literary novels in a row. Follow a challenging literary novel with a mystery or a memoir. Follow dense nonfiction with light fiction. This keeps reading pleasurable and prevents the fatigue that comes from too much of anything.
What Not to Do
Do not choose books based solely on bestseller lists. Bestseller lists measure marketing spend as much as quality. Many of the greatest books in our database were never bestsellers.
Do not read books out of obligation. "Everyone says I should read this" is a bad reason to read anything. Read what interests you. The classics will still be there when you are ready for them.
Do not ignore genres you think you dislike. If you think you do not like science fiction, try Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. If you think you do not like romance, try Pride and Prejudice. The best books in every genre transcend genre.