This summer, my friend and I spent more than 70 hours in his Land Cruiser traveling across the West. That is a lot of time to fill, and as a typical librarian I wanted to find an audiobook we could put on to pass some of the dashboard time.

One complication: my friend doesn’t read novels. he’s wasn’t completely opposed to trying an audiobook, but books aren’t his usual way of experiencing stories.

So I had a readers’ advisory problem. I’d learned the fundamentals in grad school, and from 2018 to 2024 I put them to use curating featured collections for the Next catalog. But that ended a while back, and readers’ advisory isn’t really part of my day-to-day work anymore.

Our first attempt at an audiobook was Dark Matter, a popular and frequently recommended novel that seemed like a reasonable choice. We made it through the first interlude.

Then we turned it off.

I had two problems with it. The first was that it’s a particular kind of trope that I don’t have much patience for: the protagonist is an exceptionally well-educated white man who is also the smartest person in the room; his wife is beautiful, artistic, and seemingly perfect; something happens and he loses the life he has—and he will stop at nothing to get it back—enough already.

The second problem was specific to the audiobook. The male narrator’s attempt at voicing the wife was completely off-putting for both of us.

Wrong book. Wrong narrator. Wrong experience.

We tried again.

We put on Dungeon Crawler Carl, and it was a hit.

It has plenty of humor, action, and references to video game that we both get. And then there’s the audiobook performance by Jeff Hays. He brings an energy to the story that makes listening feel less like “reading a book” and more like experiencing a show together.

That experience got me thinking about what readers’ advisory actually asks us to do.

It isn’t simply knowing which books are popular. It isn’t even necessarily knowing which books are “good.” It’s understanding the reader in front of you—their interests, their experiences, their expectations, their mood—and figuring out what might connect with them right now.

Sometimes that means recommending science fiction to someone who doesn’t normally read science fiction. Sometimes it means knowing that a particular audiobook narrator might make or break the experience. Sometimes it means understanding that a reader who says they like mysteries may actually be looking for pacing, humor, or a particular kind of character rather than another mystery at all.

And sometimes, you recommend the wrong book. That’s part of the work, too.

Readers’ advisory is a practice we get better at by doing it—and by talking about it with other people who are doing it. We discover books we haven’t read. We compare notes. We challenge our assumptions. We talk about genres and appeals and formats. We share the recommendations that worked and the ones that spectacularly did not.

Which is really just a more intentional version of what happened with us: trial, error, and eventually, a match.

That’s the idea behind Every Book Its Reader: A Readers’ Advisory Gathering, happening September 18 at Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library. It’s an opportunity to spend time with people who care about this work, explore how others approach it, discover new ideas, and think together about how we connect adult readers with meaningful reading experiences.

We’ll hear from author and Kansas Book Festival Executive Director Lara Avery, explore TSCPL’s personalized recommendation service, talk about effective library displays, and spend time in small-group genre conversations and a panel with readers’ advisory practitioners.

Whether you’re thinking about how to recommend science fiction to someone whose reference points are movies and television, exploring what makes an audiobook compelling, trying to expand your knowledge of a genre, or simply looking for new ways to have better conversations with readers, I hope you’ll join us.

As for Carl, we didn’t quite finish the first book in the series. We’d only put it on during the dull stretches of driving—and it turns out a 70-hour trip through the coast, the redwoods, and the mountains doesn’t have all that many dull stretches. A good problem to have.

At some point, my buddy and I discovered that Dungeon Crawler Carl is only the first of many books in the series. We realized we had somehow found a new problem: we now had a lot more books to listen to than we had road trips.

We may not have finished Dungeon Crawler Carl, but we found a book we both want to come back to—and isn’t that part of the point? Every book its reader. Sometimes we just have to figure out who that reader is.