Online Library / Finding Something To Read

Read the first page, not the back cover

Blurbs are written to sell. The first page is written by the person you will spend hours with.

A blurb is marketing copy. It is written after the fact by someone whose job is to get you to take the thing home, and it is deliberately constructed to be appealing to as many people as possible. It tells you the premise. It tells you nothing about whether you can stand the voice, and voice is what actually determines whether you finish something. Choosing by blurb is how people end up with a stack of books whose subjects they like and whose sentences they cannot get through. The premise was never the problem, and it never is.

So use a simpler test. Open it and read the first page standing where you are. Not skim it, read it. If the sentences move you along without effort, that is a real signal. If you find yourself rereading a line because it went past without meaning anything, that is also a real signal, and it will not improve at page ninety. For non fiction, try the first page of a chapter in the middle instead, where the author has stopped performing an introduction and is doing the actual work.

This takes about ninety seconds and it is astonishingly reliable. It also has a pleasant side effect: it makes you a faster and braver chooser. Once you trust a quick test you stop agonising, you take four things instead of one, and you accept that two of them will not work out. That is the correct ratio. A reading life built entirely on things you were certain about in advance will be a small one. Certainty is a poor guide to enjoyment, and it filters out precisely the things you could not have predicted liking.