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Quizzes

Quiz: What Reading Aesthetic Are You?

Leah Rachel von Essen

Senior Contributor

By day, Leah Rachel von Essen is the editor-in-chief of Chicago Booth Magazine at the University of Chicago. By night, she reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram. She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. Twitter: @reading_while

What's your reading aesthetic? Are you up late at night reading with the stars out your window? Or is your favorite place to read on the grass in the summer sun? Or are you fond of shadowy library stacks, or warm leather armchairs with a latte on the table beside you? Do you shelve your books based on topic, color, author — or do you just try to fit the newest addition to your library into whichever shelf you can just barely make room in?

Are you the cottagecore reader with their picnic blanket? The librarian in their cozy cardigan? The dark academic with a paperback in their pocket? The collector with their hardbacks neatly in a row? The insomniac with their dog-eared pages? Or are you the cozy autumn reader with their hot chocolate and knit sweater?

There's no real way to lose when you're taking this quiz, because we're all readers here. But of course, I'm sure some of you will go into this quiz knowing which aesthetic you think are, and some may come out somewhere else entirely. And, if we're honest, most of us are whirls of a couple of these types. I'm a cottagecore reader at my best, reading outside whenever I can and stealing sunshine, but at home, I'm an insomniac (both literally and in terms of reading aesthetic). And the pandemic, with its anxieties and quarantines, has kept us all away from our favorite indie bookstores and reading spots around town.

So who knows? You might surprise yourself. So don't dally — stick a bookmark in your current read and dive into this quiz to discover your reading aesthetic. Good luck, and may your next book be a five-star read.