I use LibraryThing to keep track of the books I’m recently reading, as you can see in my sidebar. But it’s also a terrific, rapidly growing community of book-lovers that is starting to reach the kind of critical mass whereby some fun data manipulation can take place.
They’ve been getting better at suggesting books to you based on the ones in your library, but their newest bit is a piece of pure, devious genius. It’s called UnSuggester, and it takes a book that you input and find out the books that you’re least likely to want based upon the millions of book lovers in its database. Here’s some interesting results…
And then I did an Unsuggest search for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and the results were interesting to see the results… 3 out of the top 4 books were by John Piper, and out of the top 30 Unsuggestions, only about 3 of them weren’t Christian books. Strange, but I suppose not surprising given the track record of Christian cultural engagement.
5 responses to “Book Un-suggester!”
Hilarious and also sad (the Christian cultural engagement bit).
Haha @ “Night Pleasures”!
Yeah, the Night Pleasures was perfect St. “sexual issues” Augustine.
I found the Harry Potter and Christian books deal funny too in a sad kind of way.
Ever tried putting the Bible in there to see what is unsuggested?
i looked up the Holy Bible in KJV and the number one unsuggester is “The Devil Wears Prada”.
others among the list are “Good in Bed” and the shopaholic series, “Shopaholic takes Manhattan” and “Shopaholic and Sister”.
The KJV specifically would be people like my grandparents, so these unsuggestions are pretty funny when you think of grandparents.
However, I wonder how many old-school KJV folk actually know how to use a keyboard, let alone the internet, let alone Library Thing.