Our method

Best Books On is a series of reference volumes, each covering one subject and each built the same way. The subjects are chosen for breadth rather than for similarity:

• Personal finance and investing
• Self-help and personal development
• Business and entrepreneurship
• Mental health and mindfulness
• Health, fitness and nutrition
• Romance
• Fantasy and science fiction
• History
• Thriller and true crime
• Cooking and food
• Parenting and relationships
• Science and nature
• Biography and memoir
• Spirituality and religion
• Psychology
• Career and productivity
• Technology and artificial intelligence
• Travel
• Young adult
• Children's and educational
• Art, design and photography
• Philosophy

What the volumes share is not a subject but a standard. Every entry in every volume answers the same four questions:

1. What does this book actually cover, stated specifically enough that a reader knows whether it contains what they came for.

2. What distinguishes it from the books beside it on the shelf, since a recommendation that could apply to five titles recommends none of them.

3. Why does it earn a place in a finite list, when the list is finite and something else was left out.

4. What are its limits, meaning the parts a reader should hold more loosely than the author does.

That fourth question is the one most reading lists omit, and it is the reason this series exists. A list that says only what is good about a book is a promotional document. Books age, evidence moves, and authors are enthusiastic about their own arguments in ways that are not always warranted. An entry that reports where a book overreaches is more useful than one that does not, and it costs the reader nothing to know.

Two kinds of books appear in each volume, and they are selected against different standards. The larger group is written for general readers: trade books, judged on whether someone without specialist training can read them and act on what they say. The smaller group is academic and professional: textbooks, clinical references, research handbooks. These are cataloged by Library of Congress classification, so that a reader who wants the reference layer of a subject can locate it within a system that libraries already use.

A word on what these volumes do not attempt. They do not rank books by quality alone, they do not summarize books in place of reading them, and they do not pretend that every subject has been settled. Where a field disagrees with itself, the disagreement is described rather than resolved, and the strongest version of each position is given rather than the most convenient one.

One further point about method. The volumes are built to a fixed architecture: the same number of titles in each chapter, the same three levels of assumed background, the same number of recommended starting points. That uniformity makes the volumes comparable and makes each one navigable once a reader has learned any of them. It also imposes useful discipline. A subject with enormous literature and a subject with a thin one receives the same space, which forces the thin subject to be candid about its thinness rather than filling the gap with confidence.

The entries are written to be read rather than skimmed, and each run to roughly a hundred and fifty words. That is long enough to say something specific and short enough that a reader can work through a whole section in one sitting. Nothing in these volumes summarizes a book in place of reading it. The purpose of an entry is to let a reader decide, and to tell them what to watch for once they have decided.

This volume covers health, fitness and nutrition, which is a subject where the volume of published advice is enormous and its reliability is invisible from outside. Six hundred and sixty books are described across twenty chapters. The aim throughout has been to leave a reader better able to judge the next book they encounter, including the ones not in this collection.

Source: the Preface, pages 5–6. Reproduced from the printed volume.