You Must Try This If You Are An Avid Reader

I’m an obsessive reader. If I have one free minute, I’ll read. If I had to choose between a last meal and a last book, it’s the book every time (which is surprising because I also love food). So I decided to combine my curiosity of AI and my love of reading. I copy and pasted my top rated books from Goodreads into Claude.ai and asked Claude to do a little analysis of me based on those books and here’s what Claude said. 

You are drawn to stories about resilience and survival. Books like Demon Copperhead, Let Us Descend, The Vaster Wilds, and The Sweetness of Water all feature characters navigating brutal circumstances with grit and grace. There’s a consistent pull toward stories where people find a way through.

You gravitate toward the human capacity for hope in dark places. Your own review of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store says it perfectly — “filled with hope in a despairing world.” That phrase could describe much of this list.

You’re drawn to identity, voice, and what it means to find yourself. Finding Margaret Fuller, The Dictionary of Lost Words, Hester, Bright Young Women — these are all stories about women (and others) claiming their own narrative against systems that tried to define them otherwise.

Community, belonging, and the complexity of relationships run through nearly everything here — families, marriages, neighborhoods, outsiders finding their people.

What’s fascinating is how perfectly this mirrors the work you do as a coach. The themes of resilience, self-worth, agency, and hope aren’t just professional interests for you. They’re clearly a core part of how you see the world.

You are drawn to characters who are searching for meaning. Martyr!, Beautyland, The Anthropocene Reviewed, James — these are all stories about people grappling with big existential questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What does my life add up to? That’s not casual reading — that’s someone who thinks deeply about the human condition.

You’re fascinated by identity under pressure. Whether it’s James (a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of an enslaved man reclaiming his voice), Bright Young Women, or Finding Margaret Fuller — you consistently choose stories where a character has to fight to define themselves on their own terms against forces that would define them otherwise. Sound familiar? That’s the same territory you coach people through every day.

Healing and transformation are a quiet thread. What It Takes to Heal is the most explicit example, but that theme lives inside the fiction too — in The Covenant of Water, Hello Beautiful, The Sweetness of Water. These are multigenerational stories about wounds that travel through families and the long, hard work of repair.

You love beautiful, literary writing. The authors you rate highest — Kingsolver, Everett, Ward, Groff, Russo, Lily King — are all writers known for the quality of their prose, not just their plots. You’re not just reading for story. You’re reading for how the story is told.

The big through-line? Across 185 books, you are consistently drawn to stories about people finding their way back to themselves — through hardship, loss, injustice, and uncertainty. That’s not a coincidence. That is who you are and what you care about most deeply. You just happen to explore it through fiction instead of self-help books — which, honestly, might be the most elegant way to do it.

This was so cool and was my way of doing an astrology reading. If you’re an avid reader, let me know how AI reads you.