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What should I read next? If I had to pick out the most oft-asked question I get from friends and acquaintances, once they’ve marked me as a book person, this would probably be it.

And in a nutshell, this question is why physical bookshops stubbornly refuse to die, against all odds and notwithstanding the drastic culling they’ve suffered over the past few years.

Online book sites do a great job of recommending your next read, with sophisticated and admittedly uncanny algorithms based on your shopping and even browsing history.

But their greatest strength is also their weakness. Their algorithms will work around your favourite books and recommend variations on the same. In that, they’re brilliant.

They’re not so intuitive when it comes to reaching out and taking a chance on something different. A new genre or style, perhaps.

Or an author wildly different to your usual reads, but whose latest novel promises something intriguing or somehow piques your interest.

So, how do you get to this ‘something different’, this wild leap of literary faith?

Sometimes it’s a bold cover design that makes you pick up a book while browsing, what I like to call the ‘grabability’ factor.

Everyone’s time is limited and people are often reluctant to waste precious leisure time reading something they might not like

Other times it’s a beguiling premise as laid out in a well-written blurb, a hook that doesn’t let go of you.

Yet, other times it’s a pull-quote on the cover by an author you respect or love, attesting how much this book blew them away.

Which is where the expertise of a professional, well-read bookseller becomes invaluable and irreplaceable by algorithms.

Discoverability: that’s the holy grail of book marketing and the most powerful weapon in a bookseller’s arsenal.

Of course, this presupposes a professional behind the counter and well-stocked shelves, by which I don’t mean just the various chart-toppers and talked-about books, but also a more quirky, personal and off-beat selection… but that’s another story.

Then there’s that old failsafe: asking a friend: “What should I read next?” How to find the ‘what to read next’ book, is often cited by many who would like to read more, but are confused by the range available.

Millions of books and vast at-our-fingertips selections do not for an easy choice make. Ironically. Everyone’s time is limited and people are often reluctant to waste precious leisure time reading something they might not like.

So, asking a friend for a recommendation. The obvious caveat is that you should ask this of someone you know has similar reading tastes to yours.

Yet, even here, the problem – and this is also another limitation of software algorithms – is that different readers will have liked the same book for wildly different reasons.

I loved Stoner, last year’s sleeper-hit-all-the-way-from-1965 by John Williams, because of the way it told us of the proud but ultimate futility of Stoner’s life, and duly recommended it to people I thought would like that sort of heart-rending bittersweet read.

A friend of mine, on the other hand, read Stoner’s life in the novel as a success whose achievements in academia somewhat made up for the rest, and has presumably recommended it to others couched in that reading.

There’s no easy answer to this, short of having a slightly more extended conversation that goes beyond the marketing-staple ‘If you liked X, you will love Y’.

Perhaps a variation could be: “If you liked X because of B and C, you might like Y.”

Ok, let’s give it a go, shall we? And if you do decide to read any of these, let me know how it goes.

If you liked The Time Traveler’s Wife for the different take on time travel – and, let’s face it, for a lingering obsession with time travel stories – and the non-linear storytelling, you might like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.

For me, August was one such chance find, while browsing and looking for something totally different in a bookshop. The premise is that August, and others like him, die only to be reborn at the exact time and place they were born the first time, to live their life over and over again. A sort of Groundhog Day for time travellers. If you liked Eggers’s The Circle for the paranoia-inducing takeover by social media of our entire lives, taken to Big Brother extremes, you might like Joshua Ferris’ To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. But then again, the two authors’ style of humour is very different. I’m still reading Ferris and I’m not sure I’m that into his brand of humour and his long meanderings.

Will you just shut up and move the plot along already, I constantly want to scream at him. Eggers’s, on the other hand, is more of a made-for-TV, fast-moving story set in a tech campus that wants to be a mash-up of Facebook, Google, Apple and a half-dozen other Silicon Valley giants.

And finally, if you liked The Cuckoo’s Calling – the first novel by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling – for the throwback to a good old-fashioned detective novel and the literary equivalent of comfort food, then most definitely do not read her sequel The Silkworm.

Pass on it and hope the third one will be a return to form and anywhere near as enjoyable as book one.