Our friends at n+1are back with their annual pre-yuletide gift. Bookmatch, the highly bespoke literary quiz, pairs readers with a custom-made syllabus based on their answers to a dozen or so quirky questions.
Be warned: this is not Buzzfeed’s multiple choice. Last year, Bookmatch pitched existential softballs, like “You like it when a book _____ you. a) skewers b) soothes c) seduces d) startles.” Previous queries have skewed cheeky. As in 2023’s prompt, “You are a finger. Which one?”
The quiz taker’s responses generate a customized 10-book reading list curated by n+1’svast contributor network. This year, recommenders include cultural heavies like Susan Orlean, Tony Tulathimutte, Jia Tolentino, Vincenzo Latronico, Sarah Thankam Matthews, and Tavi Gevinson.
Quiz-takers also receive a discount to purchase books on their list viathe good old indie bookseller McNally Jackson.
Eh, but it’s just an internet quiz, you protest. How “bespoke” could it possibly be? Consider a personal testimony. Last year’s Bookmatch led me to some of my favorite reads in 2025, including Charlotte Shane’s An Honest Womanand the diaries of Helen Garner.
Somehow, the masthead could also divine both my inner Boomer (Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties) and my inner Buddhist priest (Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion).
It’s a wild thing to feel seen by something built with binary. But I am here to tell you, the better world is possible.
Or as co-editor Dayna Tortorici has it, the pleasure of the thoughtful hand sell is very much alive. “There are powerful actors in the world trying to suppress what remains of the life of the mind,” she said in a giddy announcement.
Billionaires cajole us left and right to surrender our cognitive function for the sake of convenience; AI slop operas serve up easy dopamine; sycophantic chatbots swaddle us in cocoons of false certainty. It’s hard not to feel like you’re living in the Pottersville timeline of It’s a Wonderful Life, amid all this. So this year the message of Bookmatch is: Slow down. Read a book. Read ten books!
Read ten books recommended by living people whose taste and intelligence are hard won and wholly singular, forged in the crucible of their idiosyncratic minds. And take heart in knowing that you have clawed back a little of what the forces of reaction are trying to take from you—your peace, your pleasure, and the unproductive, ruminative hours that are your birthright as a human being.
Bookmatch runs through December 1st. All you have to do to get skewered, soothed, seduced, or startled is donate any dollar amount to the magazine.