What’s Your Ultimate Summer Read?

2 minute read

START HERE

[The following text appears within a diagram. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual diagram.]

Fiction or nonfiction?

Fiction

Want powerful emotions?

Yes

If you liked

Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

Read

Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

No, I like some action

Squeamish about violence?

Yes

If you liked

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Read

Karl Taro Greenfeld’s The Subprimes

No, thrill me

Sales doubled for The Goldfinch the week after it won the Pulitzer Prize

Like the supernatural?

Yes

If you liked

Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn

Read

Stephen King’s Finders Keepers

No, but I love strong heroines

Troublemakers or problem solvers?

Rogues

If you liked

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl

Exemplars

If you liked

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Read

Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive

Read

Robin Kirman’s Bradstreet Gate

Rosamund Pike and Rooney Mara earned Best Actress Oscar nods for Gone Girl and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, respectively

Nonfiction

Feeling introspective?

Tickets to Oprah Winfrey’s 2014 tour, featuring Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, ran as high as $999

No, I’m more outward-looking

If you liked

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love

Yes

Read

Robin Rinaldi’s The Wild Oats Project

Interested in history?

No, I’m curious about the present

If you liked

Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken

Yes

Read

Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Furies

Unbroken and Lean In were reissued in versions for young audiences

Want a taste of geopolitics?

Yes

If you liked

Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat

Read

John LeFevre’s Straight to Hell

No, I just want to understand people

How we can be, or why we are?

Can be!

If you liked

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In

Are!

If you liked

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers

Read

Janice Kaplan’s The Gratitude Diaries

Read

Frank Wilczek’s A Beautiful Question

More Must-Reads From TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com