Putting together The Pleasure List
Asking people to nominate the books they most enjoyed for pleasure sounded simple. It was not.
In developing The Pleasure List – a crowd-sourced selection of 36 adult books (plus three children’s titles) designed to celebrate the many joys to be found in fiction, run by Hay Festival in partnership with the National Year of Reading – one thing became clear fast: what looks like a simple reader proposition is, in fact, a strategic industry question. What does reading for pleasure mean now, and what does that tell us about how readers choose, value and come back to books?
Asking people to nominate the books they most enjoyed for pleasure sounded simple. It was not. The responses exposed a question at the heart of publishing: what do readers actually mean by pleasure? Comfort, escapism, challenge, emotional depth, humour, pace, familiarity, surprise? Can a devastating novel still be a pleasurable read if it gives a reader exactly what they need? And how do we build a list that reflects not just reputation, but the real reasons readers enter – and remain in – the reading ecosystem?
The thousands of nominations submitted over six months made one thing unmistakable: reading for pleasure is intensely personal, but it is also one of the clearest signals of long-term reader attachment. For some, pleasure meant total immersion – the book they could not put down. For others, it meant solace, nostalgia, recognition or challenge. Some returned to classics; others championed fantasy, poetry, romance or crime. The lesson for the trade is clear: readership is not built through sameness. It is built through range, relevance and emotional return. That range was the project’s strength – and its test.
Too often, literary lists default to consensus, prestige or cultural duty – the books people feel they should name rather than the books they urgently recommend. The Pleasure List was built to resist that instinct. It is not a canon, and it is not a hierarchy of worth. It is a record of authentic reader response: the books people return to, press into other people’s hands, finish late into the night and carry with them long after the final page. For publishers and booksellers, that distinction matters. Visibility is not discovery. Awareness is not advocacy. And being noticed is not the same as being read.
The Pleasure List became more than a list of titles. It became a snapshot of what readers are seeking now: connection, immersion, comfort, stimulation, perspective and escape – often all at once.
That meant embracing contradiction, not sanding it down. The final selection places Dickens alongside BookTok favourites, literary fiction beside fantasy epics, humour beside heartbreak. A Little Life appears next to Right Ho, Jeeves. Rebecca sits alongside Fourth Wing. Some readers will question those juxtapositions. Good. That friction is not a flaw; it is proof of a live, plural and commercially significant reading culture. If the trade wants to reach readers as they are, it must take that breadth seriously.
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Representation mattered too – not only in demographic terms, but across moods, genres, traditions and points of entry. We wanted the list to feel expansive, not excluding: broad enough for a lapsed reader to re-enter, rich enough for a committed one to discover something new. That matters when so many adults say they want to read more, yet struggle to find the time, concentration or confidence to begin again. If the industry is serious about growing readership, accessibility has to mean more than format and price. It also has to mean invitation, discoverability and relevance.
One of the clearest signals from the process was the emotional precision behind so many recommendations. Repeatedly, people described books not as cultural assets, but as companions: books that carried them through grief, loneliness, adolescence, illness or uncertainty; books that made them laugh at exactly the right moment; books that reminded them how immersive reading can be when life feels fragmented and overstimulated. For an industry often focused on metadata, positioning and performance, that is worth remembering. Reader loyalty is built where emotional need meets the right book.
In that sense, The Pleasure List became more than a list of titles. It became a snapshot of what readers are seeking now: connection, immersion, comfort, stimulation, perspective and escape – often all at once. That should matter to publishers, booksellers, festivals and educators alike. Readers are not looking for one narrow kind of value. They are looking for books that do more than one job – and that should shape how we publish, position and recommend them.
Reducing thousands of nominations to 39 titles was always going to be imperfect, and no final list could ever be complete. But that incompleteness tells us something important. Reading for pleasure resists rigid definition because readers do. The most pleasurable book is not necessarily the happiest, easiest or most critically admired. It is the book that reaches a reader at the right moment and stays with them. In a market where attention is contested and loyalty is fragile, that is the relationship the industry should care about most.
That complexity is not a problem to solve. It is the source of the sector’s edge.
