To say I love to read would be an understatement. For the amount of books I have in my (digital) library, I still get stumped whenever I am asked for a book recommendation. Of course I want to consider the literary predilections of the person asking: fiction vs nonfiction, how much time they have on their hands, their reason for reading etc. However, consider the case that I have no prior information about the person I am making a recommendation to. How do I maximize the chances of a person appreciating the book I recommend to them?

This business of getting stumped on being asked for a recommendation got me thinking of nice metrics (heuristics?) to measure the worth of a book. The books I have personally enjoyed have satisfied one or more of the criteria below.

Amount of times put down per reading period

“Un-put-down-able” is quality, I’m sure, almost every writer would want their books to have but as much as I like ultra-engaging books they do not compare to those books that frequently make you hit the stop light. These books are “anti-un-put-down-able”. They make you stop to think ever so often. Not for size nor for boredom, but for richness of content. These books are so dense that you have to drop them every 10 minutes to ruminate on what you had just read.

If “Un-put-down-able” books are the over-sugared cereals with empty calories, these books are the goat steak and roasted yams that actually make you full.

I remember reading In Defense of Sanity by GK Chesterton on my way to class one Tuesday morning, and almost missed my bus stop pondering on the few sentences I had just read. A Confession by Leo Tolstoy was another of such books. Some of these books are surprisingly short but pack so much punch that they take longer to properly read than a lot of the bloat on the best sellers list.

Amount of rabbit holes exposed

In most customer facing business, it is common knowledge that the majority of one’s customers come from referrals. Same as in the good book landscape. Good books almost always point you to other good or even better books. These books are positively rabbit holes that you must eagerly dive into.

I remember how reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb exposed me to “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Kahneman and Tversky, “Letters on Ethics” by Seneca, “Risk Savvy” by Gerd Gigerenzer, and the brilliant essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” by Friedrich Hayek. These books have further directed me to other books which have been just as great as their parents.

Ratio of expressions to statements

As much as I love to learn, most of my reading has nothing to do with learning. The learning that comes with reading is like Vitamin C that comes with eating a bag of clementines. Vitamin C is nice to have but no one ever ate a bag of clementines just for it. In Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley put it best when he said:

After all, what is reading but a vice like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind…

For me, the greater the ratio of expressions to statements in a piece of writing, the more enjoyable it is. Anyone can make a statement like I am doing write now, but only great writers can truly express.

“Translations are often imperfect” is a statement. “All languages are equally rich but not in convertible currency” is a delightful expression. Writers, and consequently books, that maximize the expressive quality of language are way more pleasurable to read than books that contain nothing but the literal.

Below are some of my favorite expressions

The great man sat in the first row and seemed to be arrogantly asleep. But when I had finished he asked the most intelligent questions. I realized that geniuses learn by a form of osmosis; a gift entirely denied to me

Erwin Chargaff in Heraclitean Fire

One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

John Fante in Ask the Dust

The designs of men are notoriously subservient to happenstance, hesitation, and haste…but to toast to Fate is to tempt Fate…

Amor Towles in A Gentleman in Moscow