Does A Book Pass The ‘Page 69 Test’?

It’s a quick way to tell whether you want to read a book — and critics may use it to judge your writing, too

Some book critics are a little like members of those religious groups that try to foretell the future by opening the Bible to a random verse. In deciding whether to review a book, the critics begin by reading not the first pages but a later section.

A lot of authors need a few chapters to hit their stride or find their voice. In cases like theirs, it may be fairest to a book to start by dipping into a middle section and going back to the first pages if it shows promise.

That’s an approach I used often when I was the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper. In that job, I received more than 400 books a week from publishers seeking reviews for their titles. My counterparts at papers with a national reach, like the Washington Post, might get 600 or more.

Neither I nor my colleagues had time to pore over the first few chapters of all those books and still write our weekly columns, edit freelance reviews, and keep up with publishing news. We had to read strategically.

Sometimes I’d read the first chapter or two. You may need to do that with a novel to get a sense of the author’s style or where the plot is…