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Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Unsuggest
John Emerson is scientifistically investigating Librarything’s Unsuggester. What’s this, you ask? It’s a thing that purports to tell you the titles of ‘anti-books’ you (or anyone) is unlikely to own, based on books owned. Emerson discovers that computer geeks don’t like Jane Austen or that sort of thing. Also, Quine’s Word and Object is the anti-Little Women. I am amused that the #1 anti-book for both The Critique of Pure Reason and Fear and Trembling is ... Confessions of a Shopaholic. I would like to report that I am seriously bucking the trend in one way: I have a copy of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, but I also have a copy of Dr. Seuss’ Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? I see no contra-indication. Buy both, I say. Emerson makes some interesting observations and says it seems like this thing would be pretty interesting to datamine, in an anti-maps, anti-graphs and anti-trees spirit. Mostly it seems like there’s some Christian stuff that’s sort of walled itself off from the rest, with a couple of James Patterson mysteries for when you get bored of pop theology and Terry Brooks. Example: there is nothing but theology in the anti-book column (72 titles) for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. And what is the anti-The Purpose Driven Church, you ask? American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. (Narrowly edging past Strange and Norrell, which is just ahead of Lolita.)
Other anti-book discovery: Minima Moralia (Theodor Adorno) is the anti Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J.K. Rowling). I’ve got them both.
Please feel free to leave your unsuggestions in the box.
Comments
I haven’t managed to stump the unsuggester. I mostly find myself nodding: that’s right, I would never own that book.
However, one note: on the sidebar, the unsuggester tells us “If you like Augustine’s Confessions, then you will not like Night Pleasures.”
I find this interesting, considering that Augustine confesses his own “night pleasures.”
Interesting! I am a computer geek with a fondness for Jane Austen, and I own both Little Women and Word and Object.
I wonder if the OED is an anti-book for the American Heritage Dictionary? And maybe Danielle Steele writes anti-books for say, Manning Marable.
The Fountainhead v. The Spivak Reader.
Sparks Notes for the Inferno v. The Inferno.
I haven’t managed to stump the unsuggester.
I just did, I sorry to say, three times in a row.
Nada on Location of Culture, No Bed for Bacon, or Benchley’s My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew. I’ll try one more time and then get back to work....nope. Just tried The Princess of Cleves (as I’m grading a paper--that’s not half bad--on it right now). No dice.
I tried an obvious one (White Noise), and, okay, it’s funny: mostly fundy eschatological fiction, but, frankly, I can see the two on the same shelf for some projects.
I like (’tho disagree with) Hayek’s *The Road to Serfdom*. Supposedly, I shouldn’t like *The Devil Wears Prada*, and I actually loved it. Then again, I love chick lit.
What’s interesting is that Hayek and most chick lit share the same economic philosophy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if more readers really enjoyed both.
As far as Christian libraries go, they especially exclude fantasy, anything erotic, excessively radical stuff, and fiction which is aggressively cynical and/or secular. What I found just now is that even Emily Bronte is apparently too much for them.
Christians do sometimes read seriousminded secular books, the antibooks to which tend to be fluff and pulp.
Luther loves chick lit! Luther loves chick lit! Na-na-na-naaa-na!
Luther, you have a mission: chicklit for the Cato Society, Hayek for the chicks.
The Unsuggester has been swamped by a Slashdot link, so today isn’t the best day to play with their system.
I highly recommend Sophie Kinsella’s *The Undomestic Goddess*. There was a period when I was commuting at least twice a month between central Ohio and Philadelphia. Chick-lit audiobooks got me through it after I got tired of swerving around the highway searching for Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money” on my iPod.
Now I’m hitting the Lemony Snicket series on audiobook for long drives. Narrated by Tim Curry, no less!
None of this has to do with the Unsuggester. But I highly recommend Kinsella, Snicket, and Dirt McGirt.
I wonder what the Unsuggester would unsuggest for fans of the Wu Tang Clan . . .
Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Arcades Project’ versus Lynne Truss’s ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves; The zero tolerance approach to punctuation’ seems somehow appropriate.
Brilliant. I entered Atomised as one of my books and the Unsuggester already knew that I hated it.
Hmm. Turns out I misunderstood the results page, which I had thought indicated the Houellebecq novel as its own anti-book. The real results were less exciting, but I did manage a stumper. No doubt Gresham Machen would harrumph his approval on finding that The Lovely Bones was the #1 anti-book to his Christianity and Liberalism. I had a good time reading both, though.
As I understand, people who enjoy both a book and its anti-book are monsters of perversity and moral equivalence. Now that the determination of anti-books has been placed on a firm scientific, empirical basis, it’s become much easier to ferret out such loathsome creatures.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity/The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
the holy bible vs. the devil wears prada
I own Oracle Night by Paul Auster and also The Lord of the Rings. Most of the anti-books for Tolkien seem to be books about knitting sweaters.
All of the “Vogue Knitting” books are listed as each other’s pro-books. It’s a hefty library of 20-30 volumes, probably including only Vogue Knitting books.
There are other knitting books and maybe the knitting blogs are using this service as a way of sharing books so everyone doesn’t buy all of them (Napsterishly). In which case there might be a lot of all-knitting libraries posted.
CS Lewis’s anti-books can be very interesting and vary from book to book. Unfortunately the system isn’t functioning very well at the moment, and it refuses to answer about the Narnia book. But some searches made it seem that there were a lot of people who read CS Lewis to the exclusion of all other books of comparable merit on similiar topics.
Here’s the C.S. Lewis link. The high quality of these books is pretty notable, which means that people reading chick lit, lifestyle books, and pulp fiction also read Lewis. As for a pattern of exclusion, it especially seems to be pro-secular anti-religious books, computer books, and leftwing / social criticism books. I hadn’t earlier thought of Lewis as being especially right-wing, but that’s the way it looks here. And it seems that Lewis writes Christian books for religionists who want smart reasons not to read left-secular books; he doesn’t seem to be writing (as I had thought) for educated people wanting smart reasons to be Christians.
I might explain that what Unsuggest does is find the most unexpectedly absent books from certain libraries. In other words, Leis’s books are more likely to be found together with “The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants” or “The Exorcist” than with Richard Rorty.
A friend of mine recently stayed for a week at the house of the head of some libertarian policy institute. My friend is someone who is definitely on the left side of the political spectrum, and he found in his vacation a wonderful opportunity to argue incessantly. He knows more about economics than he does, say, philosophy, so he was able to hold his own on the first front but when it came to the second, he found himself out ranted. He called me in distress one night asking me what I had to say about “natural law theory” and complaining that his brief familiarity with Nietzsche was not doing the trick this time, as his opponent claimed that Nietzsche had been summarily refuted by C.S. Lewis. I briefly wondered if I had missed some vast and powerful argument of Aslan’s before I had to ask “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe guy?”
When my friend arrived back in town, he explained that somehow, C.S. Lewis’s writing just struck the right chords with these people and they referred back to him constantly when talk of economics wandered into morality. I was expecting maybe Ayn Rand, but perhaps she can come off as a little crazy on that end and they needed someone more generally publically respectable? It is a mystery to me.
A number of philosophy books have an anti-book in The Devil Wears Prada. Nearly everything in my bookshelf, non-fiction or otherwise had an anti-book in Christian literature, which I refuse to let fuel any prejudice on my part. The most notable exception was Rendezvous with Rama, which had an anti-book list was populated by what seemed to be rather morose “chick lit”, and a few suggestions that seemed to imply that for some reason Arthur C Clarke fans had something against McSweeney’s.
Oh, it also insisted, for no apparent reason, in the sidebar, that I would not like A Confederacy of Dunces, which is funny because only today I started reading it.
Great fun! It seems that Wendell Berry fans shouldn’t like science fiction. I love both. I had similar results for most of the books that I tried.
The biggest drawback for me is practical. They don’t include books with less than 75 readers listing it. That makes sense since the sample size is too small, but that means that many of my favorite books aren’t listed. Even Les Miserables isn’t listed since its readers are split between editions.
I did find the “Unsuggester” useful for suggesting books though.
Iron Council #2 Unsuggestion is Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. I enjoyed the movie, though I can’t imagine actually reading the book - does that count
I had the CS Lewis thing too.
"Sisterhood of the travelling pants” is the opposite of almost everything.
The Unsuggester is based on which books people choose to put into their librarything libraries. So there’s not only a readership effect and an ownership effect (i.e. do people choose to own the book or get it from their public library), there’s also an embarassment effect. Public Christians whose friends look over their librarything collections probably don’t put in certain books; people who want to catalog their “serious” books may not put in The Devil Wears Prada.
Yeah, but check “Wuthering Heights” or “Middlemarch” and you’ll see that these guys are very easily embarassed indeed.
John le Carré’s The Looking-Glass War and The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career
I don’t find this thing to be very useful. It seems that every book I type in ("The Grand Complication,” “The Remains of the Day,” “Foucault’s Pendulum,” “Snow"), I always get Christian books as unsuggestions. Which is nothing new to me, since I’m atheist.
Interestingly enough, if you type in anything by Terry Pratchett--"Moving Pictures,” for example--you get a lot of Christian books as unsuggestions. It also lists “Mein Kampf” as an unsuggestion. So maybe I should go read some more of Pratchett’s books.
Most conceptually satisfying pair I’ve found: “Dead Souls” and “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”.
A very surprising unsuggestion: C.S. Lewis “The Magician’s Nephew” gives J.K. Rowling “The Harry Potter Boxed set”
Phillip K. Dick “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” vs. Wayne Grudem “Systematic Theology: an introduction to biblical doctrine”
Interestingly, I got sf/f suggested as my unbooks, because in addition to the sf/f I own, I also have several novels by Charles Williams. When I put in the Williams books, it told me I wouldn’t like Nick Hornby (love his stuff), Neil Gaiman (ditto), and several good sf writers. The overlap of unbooks based on four very different books I own, was pretty much trash romance and thriller. And twice it told me not to read The Da Vinci Code!