Looking for a great random book to read? This random book generator suggests a great novel or non-fiction story from hundreds of options.
This random book generator includes over 400 novels and other books. The books fall into the following categories:
- Award Winning Books
- Critically Acclaimed Books
- Highly Rated Books
- Random Good Books and Books from Random Countries
You can read more about the book selection process further below. However, you can also ignore that part and use the randomizer below to find a random book to read!
Random Book Generator
Click the button below to get a random book suggestion. Each entry includes a link to the book’s page on either Goodreads or review aggregator site Book Marks.
Your random book is…
Selecting Random Books for the Generator
The suggestion randomizer focuses on novels, but it also includes some memoirs and other non-fiction books. Here’s how I selected the books for the generator:
1) Award Winning Books
First, I picked random Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners. These are some of the most renowned book awards in the world.
Both awards have gone through minor name changes over the years. From 1969 to 2991, the Booker Prize was known as the Booker Prize for Fiction. The title switched to Man Booker Prize (2002-2019) before settling into its current, shortened version.
Pulitzer Prizes are awarded in categories related to arts and writing. From 1918 to 1947, the book award was called the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. In 1948, the name was changed to the current Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
2) Critically Acclaimed Novels
I used two sources to find critically acclaimed books. Review aggregator sites Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes don’t list books, but I found a similar service called Book Marks. I added all the site’s best reviewed books on the randomizer.
To get more historical suggestions, I picked random entries from the literary reference book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. For one reason or another, these entries are deemed culturally significant and worth reading.
3) Highly Rated Books
For books praised by readers, I picked 50 highest rated popular books on social reading platform Goodreads. Goodreads doesn’t automatically offer such a list, but luckily one user maintains an updated list of such books.
The list features the highest rated books on Goodreads with at least 10,000 ratings. Many novels in the list are a part of a larger saga. Only one book per series appears on the list.
4) Random Good Books
To make the random book generator more random, I added some completely random good books to the randomizer. For this, I once again got some help from Goodreads.
Every book on Goodreads has an individual title number that runs from 1 to ~64 million. Using a random number generator, I picked dozens of random numbers from that range to find random entries on Goodreads. If the number directed me to a book with at least a few ratings and a score of 3.0/5 or more, I added it to the list.
5) Books from Random Countries
This site, Arimo Travels, is originally a sustainable travel blog. Because of this, I’ve wanted to include cultural diversity in the randomizer.
I used my own Random Country Generator to pick several random countries. I then tried to find a good and popular book from each country. Websites such as Read Around The World Challenge were very helpful as I searched for stories from different countries.
+ A Few Personal Book Recommendations
As I’ve done with my other random entertainment pickers (random board games, movies, TV shows, songs, and video games), I’ve added a few personal recommendations to the randomizer.
I hold these novels and stories close to my heart. I also feel that they add something significant to the pool of writings.
On a first glance, finding a random book generator on a travel blog can seem a bit random. But for me, books and traveling have always gone hand in hand. I have always read a lot on my travels, and I listed my Amazon Kindle Paperwhite e-reader as one of the most useful things that I packed for my mostly flightless 2-year trip around the world.
Ps. The picture at the top was done using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 artificial intelligence. You can find my 40+ other random generators here.