What's Your Reading Personality?

1. My feelings about young adult fiction are best described as…

• I read The Hunger Games so I could talk about it with my book club
• Team Edward
• I loved reading about how the Swiss Family Robinson coped on a desert island
• Nothing compares to C.S. Lewis and E.B. White
• I don't have a lot of time to read, but if my kids like it, I check it out

2. The last time I read a 500-page book, I…

• Loved getting lost in the minutiae of the story
• Was in college
• Learned so much
• Wished George R.R. Martin would hurry up with the sequel already
• Underlined my favorite passages so I could look at them later

3. I'll abandon a book when…

• The characters all seem like jerks
• The writing is meh
• The story lacks even a hint of love—not chaste love or lusty love, tragic or unrequited, historical or fantastical
• I feel like none of the information is new or useful

4. I'm most likely to choose a book because…

• I hear about it on a morning show or see it on a best-seller list
• Three words: Kindle Love Stories
• The writing could be described as "incantatory," "luminous" or "intricate"
• Its subject or title catches my eye and makes me want to know more

5. When I'm reading, I'm drawn in by…

• Characters who do the right thing even in difficult situations
• Long, complex stories that unfold slowly, where you have to get to the end to see the whole picture
• Language, language, language
• The experience of living in another world for a little while
• A new perspective on ideas I'd never considered before

6. Biographies and memoir interest me when…

• I admire the people they're about
• They read like fiction
• The person has changed significantly over time, and you can watch them evolve, volume after volume
• The story is like my life—or at least my feelings about my life
• Everyone's talking about the book

7. Pick the best story not set in the present day…

• A sweeping, comprehensive, three-volume novel or memoir
• An epic romance long on details about hoop skirts, corsets and their removal
• A juicy new controversial biography of a historical figure
• No, thanks, I stick to 21st-century, domestic dramas—the big, the small, the suburban…

8. Happy endings are…

• The crown of a satisfying reading experience
• Lovely, but I also enjoy it when the last page prompts a really good cry
• Boring. Didn't Tolstoy say that all happy endings are alike?
• Okay, but they're not terribly reflective of real life, are they?

9. There's nothing more romantic than…

• Two people getting past obstacles, self-inflicted and otherwise, to (finally!) fall in love
• Bad guys being brought to justice; smart triumphing over the idiotic
• A swashbuckling quest, an epic adventure, a far-off land
• The one perfect sentence that jumps right off the page
• The 10,000 sentences that cover every inch of a story

10. If I had to read a classic, it'd be…

• The Odyssey—one day I'll build a raft like Odysseus did
• Anna Karenina—its ending is tragic, but she deserved her fate
• David Copperfield—because he wanted to be the hero of his own life
• Wuthering Heights—I long to weep for star-crossed Heathcliff and Cathy…
• The Man Without Qualities—but of course, I'd be re-reading favorite passages
• Don Quixote—and I want to get the two-volume edition, not one of those small-print editions, I don't mind the bulk
• Song of Solomon (the president says it's one of his favorite books)
• A Room with a View or Howard's End because a female protagonist eventually achieves a happy marriage