Most people do not read one genre because they have decided other genres are bad. They read one genre because it reliably works, and the alternative is gambling an evening on something that might not. That is a reasonable instinct. The cost is that you end up with a very narrow idea of what a book can do to you.
You are not trying to become a person who reads everything. You are trying to make one successful crossing, so the next one is cheaper.
Start from what you like, not from the label
Genre is a shelving convention. It tells you very little about the experience. What you actually respond to is something smaller and more portable: dread, banter, competence, longing, moral argument, a puzzle, a voice you would follow anywhere.
So name that first. If what you love about romance is two people being honest under pressure, the nearest unfamiliar shelf is literary fiction about marriage, not the thriller aisle. If what you love about fantasy is the feeling of a system with rules, hard science fiction and a good heist novel are both one step away. Work sideways along the thing you like, not randomly across the store.
Use a bridge book
The fastest way into a genre is a book that has one foot in a genre you already read. Romantasy is a bridge from romance into fantasy. A literary mystery is a bridge from literary fiction into crime. Historical romance is a bridge in two directions at once. Horror has a gothic wing that reads almost entirely as atmosphere and family secrets.
Bridge books get dismissed by purists of both genres, which is exactly why they work: they are written for someone who is not yet a native. If you want a longer method for choosing one, how to find your next book walks through it, and what to read after a favourite book is about finding the specific quality you want to chase.
Pick the shortest decent one
Do not open your genre experiment with an 800-page cornerstone of the field. The cost of being wrong is too high, and the long books in any genre usually assume you already enjoy its conventions.
Go short. A 200-page novel or a novella gives you the full flavour of a genre for two evenings of risk, and if you hate it you have lost almost nothing. Short books to beat a reading slump is built for exactly this kind of low-stakes attempt.
Give it twenty pages, then decide once
Unfamiliar genres feel wrong for the first chapter because the conventions are unfamiliar, not because the book is bad. Science fiction asks you to hold unexplained nouns for a while. Crime asks you to tolerate a slow setup. Literary fiction often withholds the plot on purpose.
So commit to twenty pages before you form an opinion, and then form it properly: am I bored, or am I just disoriented? Disorientation usually resolves by page fifty. Boredom does not. If it is boredom, stop — there is no virtue in finishing a book that is making you dislike reading.
Lower the money stakes
Experiments go badly when each one costs the price of a meal. Use a library, borrow from the friend who will not stop recommending it, read a public-domain title for free, or sample the first chapter before committing. How to read more without buying books covers the options. When an attempt is free, you will make five of them instead of one.
If you bounce off, blame the book
One failed attempt is a data point about one author, not a verdict on a genre containing thousands of writers. People write off poetry after one bad school assignment and science fiction after one novel of dry exposition. Give any genre two or three genuinely different tries before you close the door — and let the second try come from a human recommendation rather than a bestseller list, because a person who knows you will aim better than an algorithm.
That is the part we tried to build into Arwy, the Android reading and writing app we make: while you are reading, it connects you with other people reading the same book, so recommendations come from someone whose taste you can actually see. It is not a catalogue, though — if what you need is a comprehensive database to browse and track, a dedicated cataloguing service will serve you better, and there is no iPhone version of Arwy yet.
Trying a genre you have never read? Find someone who lives there. Arwy is on Google Play.