So Goodreads posted a blog post last month called "Personality Picks: Book Recommendations for (Nearly) Every Type of Reader" and I thought it was a cute idea except most of their recs suck (they chose a lot of really popular ones) and I'd rather hear from the PB community 😊I'll list the categories they used below. Give me recs for as many as you're able to!

The Canonical Reader: Only the Classics for Me The Movie Buff Reader: Book-to-Screen The Snug-at-Home Reader: I Like All Things Charming and Cozy The "What Is Wrong with You?!" Reader: Dark and Twisted The Cheerleader Reader: I'll Always Support a Debut! The "I'm Going to Film Myself Crying over This Book for TikTok" Reader The Vibes Reader: I'll Read Any Book with a Great/Wacky/Unhinged Premise The "I Don't Have Time to Read" Reader: I Need Single-Sitting Books The Random Hyperfixation Reader: This Year I'm Reading Books with an Animal on the Cover The Epistolary Reader: I Love Books Told in Letters The Bite-Size Reader: Gimme Some Great Short Stories The Eternal Optimist Reader: It Has to Have a Happily-Ever-After The Avant-Garde Reader: I Like Super-Experimental Books The Chart-Topper Reader: If Everyone Else Is Reading It, Then I Will Too The "I Just Listened to an NPR Segment about That" Reader: Nonfiction in the News The "Did You Hear About…" Reader: Juicy and Revealing Memoirs The "Make Me Better" Reader: Self-Improvement Nonfiction

Time to escape reality and step into something a little more magical ... 🐉📚

You know the rules! Pick your side, defend your choice, and tell me why in the comments 👇 (I love seeing the debates on these!)

Would you rather...

1. 🐉 Bond with a dragon OR 🧝 Master powerful magic?

2. 🗡️ Be the chosen hero OR 🖤 Be the morally gray villain everyone loves?

3. 🏰 Live in a grand magical kingdom OR 🌲 Roam a mysterious enchanted forest?

4. 📜 Have ancient forbidden magic OR ✨ Have rare, natural-born magic?

5. 🧙 Train under a legendary mage OR ⚔️ Train with an elite group of warriors?

6. 🗺️ Go on a dangerous quest OR 👑 Stay behind and rule the kingdom?

7. 🔮 Know your destiny from the start OR ❓ Discover it slowly along the way?

8. 🕯️ Read a slow-burn epic fantasy series OR ⚡ Devour a fast-paced fantasy standalone?

9. 🐺 Have an animal companion OR 👻 Be guided by a mysterious magical spirit?

10. 🌌 Wield light magic OR 🌑 Wield shadow magic?

I made a reply to another post on here about how algorithms are a huge part in why people don’t go “crate diving” anymore when it comes to music and how similar activities for all forms of media have fallen out of popularity.

With that preamble out of the way, this is more of a temperature check than anything. Do you find yourself primarily as someone who:

A: Reads books based on word of mouth (booktubers, algorithm recommendations, etc).

B: Reads books cold, with nothing more than the cover, blurb written on the book, or vague familiarity pulling you in.

I’m sure most people sit in the middle. But I’m really curious if the modern reader skews more towards A and I’m just in the “old man yells at cloud” camp, or if there are more B enjoyers like myself!

The elves are kinda mean 💀

okayyy this is actually so good!! went in knowing absolutely nothing and I’m so glad I did, this is shaping up to be such a fun read.

I swear, I'm actually a (somewhat sane) logical person who loves reading and loves data. I also happen to be a pretty fast reader who prioritizes her reading time above almost everything else (including actual responsibilities). Yet, despite all logic, I am currently at war with a single, arbitrary metric: the "Average Time to Finish" stat on Storygraph.

Because I'm a concurrent mood reader, I always have a rotation of books going at once. To my brain, this is just variety. To my SG tracker, this looks like "taking 17 days to finish a 150 page novella" because I dared to read other things at the same time. Even though I'm reading a solid number of pages each day, seeing that "days to finish" number climb bugs me more than it should, and thus it has become my mortal enemy.

To defeat my enemy, I have resorted to psychological warfare (against myself): On SG, I don't mark a book as currently reading until I've gotten past the intro and know that I'm in the mood for this book. If the app doesn't know I've started reading it, the clock hasn't started ticking!! By doing this, I'm technically destroying my own "pages per day" data. Do I do anything with any of this data? No. Does it bother my (otherwise) logical brain that my stats are now inaccurate? Yes. But is it worth it to see a "3 days to finish" average stat? Apparently, also yes.

What I suspect my therapist will say: 1) This is your perfectionism - the stat is measuring duration, not volume or intensity. 2) You've made 'fast reader' part of your identity, and by gatekeeping your start dates, you are trying to reclaim agency over a system that isn't built for the way you actually live.

I know I should just ignore the stat. But I can't! I know the tracker is just measuring how long a book sat in my rotation, not my effort or a critique of my 'reader' identity. But I've decided that "average time to finish" is the only grade that matters, and I'm over here trying to get an A+ in a completely made-up class.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who feels personally attacked by this metric!

Also, just to be clear - this is in no way meant to be a dig on slower readers! All reading at any pace should be celebrated!! This is purely a first-world "data geek" problem about a metric I should just ignore.

TL;DR: I'm a high-volume reader who juggles too many books at once. Storygraph's "average time to finish" tracker hurts my feelings, so I've started faking my start dates to protect my (clearly fragile) ego. Does anyone else "game the system" just to keep their stats from hurting their feelings?

I’ve just seen this quest and I was surprised to see such titles as Wolf Hall, The Other Boleyn Girl, and Hamnet, which are Tudor-era novels, not medieval. Perhaps this may be seen as pedantic but I just wanted to point out that they belong to completely different eras and these three in particular belong to the Early Modern Era, which marks the end of medievalism in England.

I don’t know if you can remove books from quests, as I don’t think you can, but I thought I’d say because they’re very much not from that era, if that’s what people are looking for. These would be for fiction belonging to the Tudors or Early Modern specifically.