There's a legend in bookish circles, perhaps an urban myth, that you can judge a book, any book, by reading page 69. If you like page 69, the theory says, you'll like the book.

I've seen this theory pop up every now and then over the years. I just started a book called How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland,  in which he claims that the page 69 theory was Marshall McLuhan's, author of the Gutenberg Elegies and originator of the phrase “the medium is the message.”

Why page 69? I suppose the idea is to allow the author time to set up the story, especially important in a novel, but also in non-fiction. I like it when a novel gets off to an immediate start, then goes back to set up the characters and the circumstances, but most novels start more slowly. Non-fiction, depending on the topic, introduces a theme and leads you into the heart of the book more quickly. We should give the author fifty pages or so to get things going. By page 100, things should be in full calamity, turmoil, controversy, whatever. So, somewhere between pages 50 and 100, you should be able to tell if the book is your kind of book. And it should be an easy number to remember. Well, you're not going to forget page 69, are you? It's so ... symmetrical.

Does the theory work? Let's give it a spin. I just finished a fascinating book about road trips called Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations by Susan Sessions Rugh. Page 69 has a man named Ralph Sims being refused a motel room, even though he offered to pay double the going rate. The motel owner quotes him a rate of $50,000. What is going on here? It turns out that Ralph Sims is a black man driving his family cross country in 1963. His story was being told to the Senate Committee on Commerce regarding Civil Rights. It was an example of a typical experience for black Americans.

I would definitely want to know more after reading that, and I did indeed like the book very much. So chalk one up for Page 69.

Let's try another. Happy Hour is for Amateurs: A Lost Decade in the World's Worst Profession by The Philadelphia Lawyer is a memoir that, according to the back cover of the review copy I received from a publisher hoping for good word-of-mouth, is a lampoon of office culture and the legal profession. Page 69 has our hero in his first office job, complaining how boring and tedious jobs are, especially office work. The entire page is one complaint after another, about how school is poor preparation for office work and that even his previous jobs, while stupid and unrewarding, were better than office work.

Based on page 69, I would skip this book. And as it turns out, after I read the first twenty pages of this loathsome book, I decided not to waste another minute on it. But not because the author was whiny. The first two chapters were frat boy reminiscences and bragging that tried my patience. The women were ugly, the other dudes were stupid mouth-breathers, and the professors were losers. So page 69 worked, but didn't let me know just how much I would hate the book if I tried to read it. Another point for page 69, on technical merits.

One more try. I read Dodsworth a few months ago. I'm a long-time fan of Sinclair Lewis, but somehow had missed reading this book. Page 69 has Sam Dodsworth in England, visiting a country estate. There's too much detail and it's pretty boring. It's deliberately boring because we're supposed to be feeling Dodsworth's boredom. But I wouldn't know that if I were deciding whether to read the book based on page 69. I would skip it. Page 69 fails on this book.

If you don't like the page 69 test, novelist Ford Madox Ford or perhaps critic John Berryman, is supposed to have had a similar theory in which he suggested reading page 99 to decide if a book is worth your time.

Go ahead, try it out. Brilliant theory or overblown urban myth?