What your summer reading list says about youJust picked your holiday book? Our choices can subconsciously reveal important parts of our personality, studies show. 8 hrs agoHealth

You’ve been dreaming about that summer break on the sun lounger, book in one hand and drink in the other, for months. Now the dash to the airport gate, train station or hours-long drive is all that stands in your way.

But what does the book you’ve just shoved in your suitcase say about you?

“It’s definitely not a random choice,” says Edgar Dubourg, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. “Your reading list is basically a map of your personality.

“When you pick a thriller or romance or horror or science fiction you’re not escaping your psychology, in a way, you’re really feeling very intuitive and very old parts of your brain.

Studies have shown that our book choices can subconsciously reveal important parts of our personality – including what gives us pleasure and what makes us feel emotion.

Research by Dr Valerie van Mulukom, a senior lecturer in psychology at Oxford Brookes University, suggests that our inner anxieties (or what she calls existential insecurities) determine which book we pick from the shelf.

During her study, she used how often someone might engage with a certain genre to match it up with one of the following four clusters:

• Epic other-world adventures (action, adventure, science fiction, dystopian/post-apocalyptic, fantasy)
• Everyday life and human relationships (comedy, romantic, drama, family, musical)
• Threat and danger (true crime, crime/mystery/thriller, horror)
• Facts and histories (documentary, biography, historical)

But what do they mean? And how do they match up with our own anxieties?

If, like me, you’re big on crime novels, then this suggests you’re concerned with – or intrigued by – threat and danger.

This isn’t just limited to old-fashioned detective novels or psychological thrillers, but can be anything from true crime and spy stories to supernatural horrors like the works of Stephen King’s books.

The UK bestseller lists have a range of titles that sit in the “threat and danger” category defined by the research, including:

• The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown (Penguin)
• The Family Friend by Claire Douglas (Penguin)
• London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador)

Meanwhile, if lustful romance is more your thing (very much not mine), then your insecurities are more likely to be about your relationships, both romantic and platonic, and your thoughts on social status and reputation.

The UK bestseller lists have a range of titles that sit in the “everyday life and human relationships” category defined by the research, including:

• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Penguin)
• The Names by Florence Knapp (Phoenix)
• Heartstopper Volume 6 by Alice Oseman (Hodder)

At the opposite end, someone who likes science fiction or fantasy novels tends to be more concerned with the state of the world.

If you’re spending your summer holiday finally reading the Game of Thrones novels, known for mixing political intrigue and medieval battles with tales of dragons and undead armies, then you’re likely to be someone who worries about climate change or the threat of war.

The UK bestseller lists have a range of titles that sit in the “epic other-world adventures” category defined by the research, including:

• Duskbound by Bree Grenwich and Parker Lennox (Penguin)
• Red Dwarf: Titan by Rob Grant and Andrew Marshall (Gollancz)
• To Flame a Wild Flower by Sarah A Parker (HarperVoyager)

For me, holiday reading is serious work. On my last trip abroad, I took eight books for a three-week holiday, ranging from Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune to James Ellroy’s noir throwback The Black Dahlia.

But not everyone likes disappearing off into fictional worlds. What if autobiographies or books about history are more your thing?

Dr Dubourg says it is narratives that are important, not necessarily whether they’re fact or fiction.

“Everybody consumes narratives, be it in the form of actual news, of anecdotes, of stories that people tell in neighbourhoods.”

The UK bestseller lists have a range of titles that sit in the “facts and history” category defined by the research, including:

• Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (Simon & Schuster)
• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Penguin)
• Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Pan)

So next time you pick up a book, what you think is just something vaguely interesting might actually make up an important part of your psychology.