I answered a lot of questions about song lyrics, personal memories passed off as universal experiences, and chose my favorite color hundreds of times. I was prescribed therapy even more often. I left blank many, many opportunities to share your thoughts or tell me a secret or what are you thinking right now? I was roasted. A lot. I’m sure it’s part confirmation bias and part dumb luck, but the amount of times I was startled by how seen I felt after some of these quizzes is astounding. More than once I was offended when a quiz called me out on my flaws, my love language, my insecurities. As full of bizarreness as it is, uQuiz keeps drawing me in with that impulse to feel known again. So, amongst learning about what type of Pokémon I’d be and what moral alignment I have, I decided to test it out for its skill at recommendations. Specifically, book recommendations. For the month of July, I read books recommended by uQuiz. Now, I would like to preface this with a few things. Firstly, these quizzes are not, as far as I am aware, regulated in any way through uQuiz. I typed “books” into the search bar and click on a few that caught my eye. Every quiz is different and thus the quality, questions, and results are different. The first quiz asked me about A24 films, my childhood reading habits, the podcasts I listen to, and, of course, made me choose a music album (a vast majority of which I hadn’t listened to before, in typical uQuiz fashion.) In cases like that, I operate on pure instinct. My result was The Melodramatist, which told me I like books full of emotion and tragedy (true) and I was emotional about The Doctor and Rose in middle school (false, it was in high school). Out of the many books the quiz recommended (A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Crush by Richard Siken, Just Above My Head by James Baldwin, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini), I chose Crush. It had been on my TBR for years. The recommendation was exactly the kick I needed to pick it up. And, honestly, I loved every second of the heartbreaking, weirdly relatable, strange poetry in it. It was full of tragedy and emotion, as prescribed, and I did end up liking it. Quiz two asked me to pick an aesthetic, a painting, a Richard Siken quote (which Crush prepared me for!), and my feelings about love. My recommended book? I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson, but without much explanation. I’m used to uQuiz authors writing entire essays on the results page, so that caught me a little bit off guard. I do, however, like complicated relationships and worlds where nothing is meaningless, and I had already read I’ll Give You the Sun before and enjoyed it. UQuiz book recommendations were spot on so far. Book recommendation three was another I had already read, The Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee, though it recommended the entire series and I had only read the first. Out of a want to read something different from these quizzes, I opted to try something new. The next quiz recommended Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos and translated by Robin Myers, a short story collection, and called me cool while also hinting that I’m pretentious. Which…okay, that’s a fair statement to make. I rarely read short story collections, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one. The stories were strange, obscure, and absolutely fantastic. Some were more abstract than others, but I was riveted by each and every one. My favorite was “Extermination,” well worth picking up the book for. Recommendation five was Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo, because it’s about sisters and grief. The latter I do, in fact, seek out in books. The former I have no negative or positive feelings towards, as a person with no sisters herself. Strangely, this was not the only recommendation about sisters I received. The last quiz I took recommended me Love by Toni Morrison (which I am a quarter of the way through and am enjoying.) Clap When You Land, a YA novel in verse, has absolutely stellar writing but wasn’t exactly for me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what wasn’t clicking. It did, though, have sisters and grief and gorgeous writing, so I was not complaining. All in all, my month of reading uQuiz book recommendations was successful. I felt alternatively seen and challenged in my reading choices, which is exactly what I was hoping. If you’re looking for new book recommendations, why don’t you try uQuiz? Or, if you want some suggestions from Book Riot folks, why not try these excellent books you’ve never heard of?
