Confederacy of a Dunce - book suggestions and unsuggestions

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

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It's time for another excellent time-wasting website, brought to my attention by a recent post on the Language Log (title: "If you loved The Chomsky Reader, you'll hate The Devil Wears Prada"). This one is the Library Thing, an online book cataloguing system that allows you to see your own collection in the context of other people's collections (N.B. you can only enter 200 books into your "collection" for free [no limit: $10/year or $25/life], but 200 is probably a pretty good start if you have time for it). To me the most interesting aspects of this site are the suggestion/anti-suggestion options. The suggestion option is similar to Amazon's recommendation system (Amazon recommendations are also presented in the Library Thing's suggestion page), "People with this book also have...", based on deviation of actual ownership of a title from the expected ownership based on popularity.

The suggestion system gives results that look like this for a few of my favorite books (I've only looked at the level of individual works; I'm a bit too busy to enter in my own library [or subset thereof]): people who own Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash tend to own other works by Stephenson, also William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and so on. Just like me. Owners of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow seem to have plenty of other Pynchon, plus William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, and Richard Powers. Just like me. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace gives more Wallace (not of IJ quality, I should note), plenty of Pynchon, also Gaddis, Dom DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen (plus Michael Chabon who keeps coming up, I'll have to check him out). A Confederacy of Dunces, however, brings up some odd results (differing depending on "v1" vs "v2", a distinction I haven't quite figured out yet*). Top of the table is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, followed closely by Gravity's Rainbow and a slew of Vonnegut titles, but also Faulkner, Joyce, Nabokov, Irving and Kerouac.

But there's also an anti-suggestion system the unsuggester (people who own X tend not to own Y): People who ownSnow Crash tend not to own Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Church, Henri Nouwen's The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society and Jan Karon's In This Mountain. Owners of Gravity's Rainbow are very short on Tim LaHaye (7 titles in the top 30 "unrecommended"), John Piper (4 titles), also missing out on The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes and Petals on the Wind by V.C. Andrews. Infinite Jest readers do not tend to own novels by James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Tamora Pierce and Dean Koontz (this is the only exception I've found: I must admit I do have something by Koontz hanging around the house that has not yet found a suitable home). Finally, A Confederacy of Dunces owners tend not to have Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship by Joshua Harris, and a mass of books by Sherrilyn Kenyon (seven of the ten unsuggested books).

*The distinction between v1 and v2 is explained in a comment on the LibraryThing blog: "Basically v2 has the "obscurity knob" turned up. It care more about the ratio of have/expected than the absolute number of have/expected. v1 is also massaged a bit to dampen high-popularity low-specificity books (eg., things you read in High School, like the Crucible)."

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Tuesday, December 12, 2006 11:13:31 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)