Tell me which books you read and I will tell you how you are

I have noticed for a long time that, especially in romantic movies or series, actions are detached from the characters. That is to say, when a character falls for someone, they love them no matter what they do. Thus, lies, abandonment, or cruelties never dissolve the infatuation, because what is loved is an essence and the behaviors are just ambient noise that, at most, is annoying. In fact, it is the same mechanism behind astrology or the decision to vote for a political party because we trust more in what they say they do, rather than in what they actually do. If we want to fight against this bad habit that is uncritical or magical thinking, but we don't know where to start to truly get to know a person, we are in luck because literature can give us a helping hand. Researcher Annalyn Ng and her team carried out a study with the aim of finding out to what extent the books we choose to read say something about who we are. To do this, they took more than 24,000 tags that readers of Goodreads placed on their readings and cross-referenced them with the personality profiles of 61,662 people, measured with the Big Five, five independent dimensions, each understood as a continuum (that is, we all place ourselves at some point on each of them): openness is intellectual curiosity and attraction to novelty; conscientiousness would be organization and discipline; extraversion is the need for social stimulation; agreeableness would be empathy and cooperation; and, finally, neuroticism, which is the tendency to experience negative emotions.What are the most open-minded readers looking for?

They found that people with openness sought philosophical novels, university readings, and classics, while those who were less open preferred light fantasy and easy-to-digest content. Neurotic individuals chose narratives that reflected their own state, such as sad endings, mental health themes, or alternative realities that allowed them to escape. In contrast, emotionally stable individuals gravitated toward self-help and non-fiction. The responsible ones read to educate themselves, and those who were less so sought humor and young adult books. Extroverts preferred social themes, such as memoirs and romance novels, while introverts liked fantasy, science fiction, horror, and manga.The highest correlation in the entire study was with the back-burner tag group, those placed on books that have been shelved: the titles that most people start but do not finish were precisely those that appealed to people with the most open-mindedness. So, to start knowing what the person in front of us is like, it will no longer be enough to know if they like to read, but we will have to ask them what they read and also which books they leave unfinished. Literary Sherlocks or astrologers: choose your fighter.