It can happen anywhere: a dinner table, a pub, a bus queue, a classroom, a bookshop. You strike up a conversation with someone you don't know, and you're getting on OK, and then suddenly, without warning, you hear the five words that mean the relationship has no future beyond the time it takes to say them: “I think you'll like it.”

This phrase is presumptuous enough when used to refer to, say, a crisp flavour; if, however, you happen to be talking about books or films or music, then it is completely unforgivable, a social solecism on a par with bottom-pinching. You think I'll like it, do you? Well, it has taken me more than 50 years to get anywhere near an understanding of what I think I might like, and even then I get it wrong half the time, so what chance have you got?

Every now and again I meet someone who is able to make shrewd and thoughtful recommendations within the first five years of our acquaintance but for the most part the people that I listen to I've known for a couple of decades, a good chunk of which has been spent talking about the things we love and hate.

We are asked to believe, usually by critics, that the most important factor in our response to a book should be its objective quality - a good book is a good book - but we know that's not true. Mood and taste are important, self-evidently, but mood and taste are formed by educational background, profession, health, amount of leisure time, marital status, state of marriage, gender (men don't read much fiction, depressingly), age, age of children, relationships with children, and parents, and siblings, and, possibly, an unfortunate experience with Thomas Pynchon's V as an overambitious and pretentious teenager. All these and thousands of others are governing factors, and many of them are wildly inconstant.

As it happens, I have been asked to choose 40-odd books for a writer's table at Waterstone's, and I think you'll like them. I think you'll like a few of them, anyway, although of course I have no idea which one or two, and I certainly have no idea who you are, or what state your marriage is in. Like many readers I fancy myself as a pretty good recommender of books (up until the recent economic calamities I had been entertaining the idea of turning pro, but this might not be the right time), and so being given the chance to drop my enthusiasms and discoveries on to a grateful public is a thrilling privilege. But where to start? How are we supposed to decide which books are still important to us? In one important regard, it seems to me, books that have shaped and guided our tastes at crucial stages of our lives are like friends from the past: you wouldn't necessarily want to go on holiday with them now.

If I were to re-read John Fowles's The Magus, would I do so in 18 hours straight, with an open mouth (and lots of attendant dribble, presumably), just as I did more than 30 years ago? The novel hasn't stayed with me, but the experience of devouring it has; it's one of the reasons why I am a constantly hopeful reader, even now, prepared to believe that the paperback I've just picked up will absorb and inspire and change me. “If I were 16, I might have thoroughly enjoyed this book,” one Amazon customer reviewer says, crushingly; “It all seems awfully silly now,” says another, who has revisited the novel since her youth. I suspect that I shouldn't look at it again, not least because I can recall the gigantic narrative trick that took our collective breath away in the 1970s. I won't be fooled again, unfortunately.

I am glad that I read Hardy's fiction when I was a student; I had plenty of appetite for misery then. There is enough anxiety attached to parenthood, without having to worry about our children hanging themselves because of our inability to provide for them, as Jude Fawley's children do.

The first Dickens novel I read was Bleak House, and for some time, even after reading most of the others, I was pretty sure that it was his masterpiece. I re-read it a couple of years ago and I was shocked to discover that Esther Summerson, who narrates a big chunk of the book, is an insufferable drip. Why had I not noticed? Am I a more observant critic now, or was I simply kinder and more indulgent when I was younger?

If we are lucky, we read the right books at the right times, and both the books and the times should be left alone. Have you read Moby-Dick yet? No? Well, don't go back to The Catcher in the Rye, then. It was great once and maybe you're asking too much of it if you want it to be great all over again. This is not to diminish the books that we read at earlier stages in our lives, not to make the claim that, as we get older, our critical faculties get sharper - the sad truth is that we lose as much as we gain.

Just about every single book on my table I have read in the past five years, and most of them have been road-tested on friends and family. You may not like them but at least I know what I think of them now and I can stand by them, defend them, argue for them. I'm not sure I could do that for Sons and Lovers or On The Road.

I don't think that you ought to read everything on this list and nor do I think that you should have read them already; I hope that you haven't, in fact. The most frequent complaint I hear from readers is that they are stuck, in a rut, bored by the literary routes that they usually take. If, as a result of these recommendations, someone sets off on a reading journey that he or she wouldn't normally have taken, and that journey ends in the sort of blissful, allconsuming absorption we all used to feel closer to the beginning of our reading lives, then I'll be happy. Meanwhile, if anyone knows of a book that will enthral a fiftysomething as much as The Magus enthralled his 19-year-old self, please let me know.

Nick Hornby's Writer's Table will launch in selected Waterstone's stores and at Waterstones.com on March 5

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