18:1710 books that will make you ADDICTED to reading!
Life on Books argues that most people who fail to become readers never had a bad attitude, they just picked a bad first book, so he hands over ten specific entry points chosen to be easy, engaging, and spread wide enough across genre that any taste lands somewhere. The ten run from Jurassic Park and a 1947 noir to Pachinko, the nonfiction thriller Shadow Divers, the almost 900 page Lonesome Dove, a Viking adventure in translation, City of Thieves, Between Two Fires, a modern language retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, and Yellowface. Three of them are deliberately long, because finishing a huge book changes how you see yourself in a way a short one does not. He is unusually honest throughout: he nearly quit one, thinks another is overrated but recommends it anyway on other readers' say so, and flags content warnings and factual disputes where they exist. The closing argument is social, that popular books are worth reading because someone else has read them and talking about books is half the pleasure.