Book recommendation triage
book disappointment risk management mitigation 2026-09-26 #books
Books offer higher risk and higher reward than reading something shorter, such as a blog post. You can manage that risk, and avoid wasting time on a bad book, with straightforward mitigations. For example, abandon a book that doesn’t work for you, before reading more than about a third of it.
Book recommendations reduce the risk of even starting a bad book, but they don’t always work, so you need to filter out bad recommendations. But you still need recommendations for books because, like restaurants, you only have time for so many in a year.
Genre
I have more luck asking people what books they enjoyed the most, because they almost certainly don’t know what I like, and may guess badly. Their favourite books generally have a lot to recommend them. Or at least in their target market.
Recommendation triage starts with filtering out genres that you don’t enjoy. Not everyone reads the same genres, so ask people for recommendations in genres they know well. Genres don’t have clear boundaries, so it also helps to consult something like The StoryGraph, which tags books with multiple genres, moods, and half a dozen other characteristics.
Size
Taking a risk on a recommendation means placing a bet with your time. Bet sizes vary: it matters whether you bet 200, 300, 500 or 800 pages, especially if you have limited time to read.
You can look up page count online, but sometimes you need to pick up an 800-page book recommendation to really assess your risk tolerance for its size. Doing this in a bookshop of course introduces the additional jeopardy/benefit of triggering loss aversion: deciding to buy a book may prove easier than not putting it back once you have picked it up.
Writing style
With modern art and books, most people don’t know what they like, but they know it when they see it. Unless you teach writing, you can probably recognise a style you like more easily than you can describe it. Triage therefore ideally includes reading a book’s first few pages, which sometimes identifies books you definitely want to read. Or don’t.
You can read a book’s first page in a bookshop, or when visiting a friend who has it in their bookcase. But to make someone an even more wholesome book recommendation, you could read the first page or chapter to them out loud.
Personal triggers
Reading for escapism only works if you actually escape from real-life unpleasantness. Sometimes book risk consists of depictions or reminders of bad experiences that you don’t want to inflict on yourself.
One self-explanatory web site solves this problem for books, and other entertainment genres: Does the dog die? In addition to a set of animal triggers, you can pin triggers in various categories. Of course, as a crowd-sourced database, fewer triggers have yes/no answers in practice.
Recommendation engines
In theory, online recommendation engines solved all of this decades ago. In practice, they solve a different ‘problem’: online retailers want to increase the number of books per order. They don’t care which book on your wish list you should read first.
