His class teacher sends home a reading list every term. The school librarian always has a suggestion when he asks. Both are free, both mean well — so before you pay for anything that promises to pick books for him, it's fair to ask whether that's actually doing something a list from school isn't.
The honest answer has a part that might surprise you, and a part that's genuinely in your child's favour.
The core finding
Bains, Spaulding, Ricketts & Krishnan (2025, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology) ran two experiments where people either chose between books or had one assigned, and measured how much they enjoyed the reading and how much they'd pay for it. Choice won both times — not because the chosen book was objectively better matched to the reader, but because choosing it themselves, at the moment of picking, raised how much they enjoyed what followed. The researchers' own read on this: the act of choosing seems to matter in its own right, not only how well the pick fits someone's interests.
The bigger picture
That lines up with an older, more sobering finding. Corsones (2010, Goucher College master's thesis) tested a structured "just-right" book-matching program designed to pair children precisely with books suited to their interests and reading level — essentially, expert curation — and found it didn't produce a significant lift in reading motivation over looser approaches. Put the two findings together and a pattern emerges: a teacher's list, a librarian's suggestion, and a curated box can all work, because what reliably moves a child isn't necessarily the precision of the match — it's whether the child has some real say in what lands in their hands.
Where it's genuinely uncertain
Bains et al.'s experiments were run on adults, not children, so some caution is warranted in applying it directly to a nine-year-old. And Corsones' thesis is a single unpublished study, not a large or widely replicated one. Neither settles the question of whether an expertly curated selection has any edge over a generic list — only that the edge, if it exists, looks smaller than you might assume, and that choice itself is doing real, measurable work regardless of who assembled the options.
What this means this week
- Whatever source you're using — school list, librarian, a subscription, your own shelf — let him choose between two or three options rather than handing him one book, full stop.
- A free list from school is a genuinely fine place to start, especially if money or logistics are tight right now. Don't feel you're shortchanging him by using it.
- If you do pay for curation, the thing worth valuing isn't just "someone smarter than me picked this" — it's whatever built-in choice and feedback loop comes with it, since that's closer to what the research actually credits.
- Mix sources freely. A teacher's list this term, a librarian's pick next month, nothing about this has to be one-or-the-other.
If you want a sense of what might suit him right now, specifically, that's a reasonable next step either way.
Sources
- Bains, A., Spaulding, C., Ricketts, J., & Krishnan, S. (2025). Providing choice enhances reading motivation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 79(4).
- Corsones, E. (2010). The effects of a structured book-matching intervention on reading motivation (Master's thesis). Goucher College.
Related reading
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