One of the great, unspoken pleasures of reading is not reading at all, but searching for what to read next—that oddly thrilling state of suspension where one hovers between books, waiting for the right one to call out. It’s a space filled with possibility, where a name, a phrase, or a half-remembered recommendation might spark a months-long intellectual affair.

Lately, I’ve been stuck in that space. I asked my coach for a suggestion. He’s still looking. I browsed my shelves, skimmed a few pages, waited for something to grab me. Nothing did.

Now, in theory, this should not be a problem. I have fifty Audible credits. Fifty. That’s nearly infinite books at my disposal. I could listen to anything, sample everything. But somehow, that makes the search feel even harder. Because this isn’t speed dating. This is looking for love at first sight.

So, in a moment of curiosity—or possibly desperation—I outsourced the search to an LLM.

Now, the idea of using a giant predictive text engine to help one find one’s next great literary love may seem like an odd inversion of how books are supposed to work. Traditionally, you stumble across a writer in a bookstore, or a friend presses a paperback into your hands, swearing it will change your life. You don’t normally feed your thoughts into an algorithm and ask, Who would write like this?

And yet, that’s exactly what I did.

The AI suggested David Foster Wallace. Chuck Palahniuk. Joan Didion. Albert Camus. Haruki Murakami. Some names I knew, some I had read, some I had only brushed past in literary conversations, nodding as if I understood.

Murakami, I knew. But Wallace?

So I read the AI’s imitation of Wallace—the spiraling loops of self-awareness, the philosophical asides that double back on themselves, the blend of anxiety and intellectual playfulness—and I had one of those small but profound moments of recognition. This is the mind I want to spend time with.

Now, this is hardly the way one is supposed to find books. You’re supposed to be drawn by an idea, a plot, a theme—not by a linguistic echo of your own neuroses. But in a strange way, this feels like a new and oddly intimate way to discover a writer—a kind of intellectual pre-screening.

This is not a replacement for reading. It’s not about AI writing for you—it’s about AI reflecting you back to yourself, filtered through voices that have already been tested by time.

So my next book will be David Foster Wallace.

Not because an algorithm told me to, but because it helped me realize I was already looking for him.

And if you found something enjoyable in this post—something in the cadence, the rhythm, the way thought and language fold into each other—then you might enjoy reading Adam Gopnik, who does this kind of thing for a living. And if you’re still looking for your next book? Try asking yourself:

“If my thoughts were a novel, who would write them?”

The answer might surprise you.