Shannon Turlington

Over on that most wonderful bookish online community, LibraryThing, entire groups and challenges are dedicated to helping us pick what to read next from the gigantic wishlist of everything we’ve ever wanted to read. My favorite way is to join in on theme challenges, selecting a book from a randomly proposed theme like “books with disasters in them” (Rivers, my next read) or even “a book that has blood on the cover” (NOS4A2, my last read).

It appears that readers everywhere have this very perplexing problem of picking what to read next and have devised all sorts of solutions. There are website services like this one or this one or this one, librarians can provide custom recommendations, or go the simple route and create a book jar. Also an attractive option for displaying next to the bookshelves.

How do you decide what to read next?