Stuck on what to read next? Press Pick a book for a real, published title with its author, first publication year, and rough length. Each pick comes with two hand-written lines: who should pick the book up, and who should skip it. Narrow the pick by genre, length, or era, and save the ones you like to a shortlist.
The Martian
2011Botanist Mark Watney is left for dead on Mars and has to stretch a habitat built for 31 days into years.
Pick up ifYou like problem solving, arithmetic, and gallows humor.
Skip ifYou want rich characters. Watney is one voice, all jokes and engineering.
Empty for now. Press Add to shortlist on any pick to keep the book here. The list stays in this browser.
Most random book pickers hand you a title and a cover. A title alone tells you nothing about whether you will finish the book. Each card here answers the three questions readers ask in a bookshop: what is the book about, how long is the commitment, and is the book for me. The first pick on this page, The Martian by Andy Weir, shows every part.
Read the Skip if line first. If the line describes you, press Not this one and move on. You lose two seconds instead of two weeks.
A 2019 review by psychologist Marc Brysbaert pooled 190 reading studies and put the average adult silent reading speed at 238 words per minute for nonfiction and 260 for fiction. A typical paperback page holds 250 to 300 words. Put those together and a page takes about one minute. The table uses half an hour of reading a day, the length of a commute or a wind-down before bed.
| Length | Pages | Reading time | At 30 minutes a day | Picks in this band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short | Under 250 pages | Under about 4.5 hours | One weekend, or under 9 days | The Great Gatsby, All Systems Red |
| Medium | 250 to 450 pages | 4.5 to 8 hours | About two weeks | Rebecca, Educated |
| Long | Over 450 pages | 8 hours and up | Three weeks or more | Dune, Shōgun |
The top of the Long band stretches far. Shōgun runs over 1,100 pages, past 20 hours for an average reader. If you have a deadline, such as a book club date, pick Short or Medium and stop worrying about the outliers.
A slump feeds on long, slow books. Set Length to Short, leave Genre on Any, and press Pick a book. Take the first pick whose Skip if line does not describe you. A finished book, any book, restarts the habit faster than a half-read masterpiece.
Clubs stall on choosing more than on reading. Have the host pick three books and add all three to the shortlist, then press Copy list and paste the result into the group chat. Members vote, one veto each. Read the Skip if lines out loud first, since content warnings matter more in a group.
Twelve books a year means one a month. Rotate First published each month: a pick from before 1950 in January, from 1950 to 1999 in February, from 2000 on in March, then repeat. By December you have read four books from each era without planning a list.
Pick the genre you read least: often Popular science for novel readers, or Horror for readers who stick to nonfiction. Set Length to Short so the experiment costs one weekend. If the pick lands, set Length to Medium next time and stay in the new genre.
Every title on the list passes the same four checks.
Yes. Every pick is a published book with its real author and year of first publication. Nothing on this page is invented. For made-up titles to use in your own story, try the Book Title Generator instead.
Not during one visit. The page remembers every book shown since you arrived and skips those. Once every book matching your filters has appeared, the memory clears and repeats start. Reloading the page also clears the memory.
Page counts change between hardcover, paperback, large print, and translation. The bands follow a common English paperback. A book near 250 or 450 pages lands in the neighboring band in some editions.
The year of first publication in the original language. One Hundred Years of Solitude shows 1967, the year of the Spanish original, not 1970, when the English translation came out.
The Toolexe team, by hand, one book at a time. Both lines are opinions. The Skip if line names the content warning or reading habit most likely to make you quit, so you find out before page fifty instead of after.
In this browser only. The list sits in local storage, so clearing site data, using a private window, or switching devices leaves the list empty. Press Copy list to keep a permanent copy in your notes.
No. The picks aim at adult readers. A few, such as The Hobbit and The Book Thief, suit teens as well, but read the Skip if line before handing a pick to a child.
No. Find on Open Library runs a search on the free catalog run by the Internet Archive. Many titles there are available to borrow as e-books, and each record links to nearby libraries. No affiliate code is attached.
