We’re out of town for the weekend visiting family, so if you usually depend on this blog for entertainment, you’ll need to find something else to do. How about a good book or two?
You can’t decide what to read? Well, the Internet is here to provide suggestions. You might, for example, think about the list of most significant SF books that was compiled by the SF Book Club. It’s the usual mix of influential and popular and has been making the rounds in LiveJournaldom, where it has come in for some criticism.
Not in the mood for genre fiction? Well, Discover has put together a list of the Greatest Science Books of All Time, so you might try one of those. If, like John Horgan, you think their list is full of books that are old and hard to read, you could also try the
Those don’t work for you either? Well, if you’re going to be all contrary, pick a title you don’t like, and feed it into the Unsuggester from LibraryThing, which will tell you the books least likely to overlap with your chosen title.
If you’d just like a way to fritter away a few hours, here’s a challenge for you: Find a reasonably mainstream book for which the Unsuggestions are not dominated by Christian devotional books. The only one I could come up with was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is a Christian devotional book in disguise. Seriously, do people who read books like The Passion of Jesus Christ : fifty reasons why He came to die by John Piper not read anything else?
(Special bonus fun note: I found the Piper book on the Usuggestions for The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. The first book on the Unsuggestions for the Piper is Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman.)
Given all that, if you can’t find something to read for a few hours, you’re beyond my power to help.
Pick any of the Left Behind novels. Likings Infinte Jest unsuggests a lot of Nora Roberts, but not much Christian stuff. Stephen Lawhead seems lacking in Christian unsuggestions, too.
Amusingly, I tried The Celestine Prophecy and #19 unsuggested was The C++ Programming Language.
I typed in Godless by Coulter to the Unsuggester. I got a lot of Douglas Adams, Margaret Atwood (natch!) and Terry Pratchett led the list by a lot. I’ve got to try some of his writing!
Oh my goodness, this is awesome.
Notice the unsuggestions for “Godless” by Anne Coulter… it basically returns the collected works of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman. Funny how that works out.
Also:
Also finding … it appears well-known fantasy novels tend to unsuggest books about knitting with surprising frequency.
I begin to wonder how diverse the results are in this thing. I mean, what if there’s a book– say, “The Hobbit“, or “Godless”– which is very niche in the sense that you’re incredibly unlikely to read it unless you already know you’re going to like it? There might turn out to be only one person on librarything who gave The Hobbit a really bad rating, for example. If that’s the case, then the unsuggestionsfor that book would basically just be that one person’s personal suggestion list. Which is the only way I can think of to explain the massive number of knitting books on The Hobbit’s list.
Coin, the “library thing” isn’t based on whether people gave a book a good or bad rating. It’s based on whether people have the book in their library or not.
Coming from a family of Jesus-arians, I can tell you that yes… people who read Jesus books read nothing else. ‘Cepting maybe the Bible.
I’m astounded at how many people read these things. I commute to NYC on public transport, and I’d say about half the people I see reading on the train are reading some kind of “Jesusy Soup for Your Soul” stuff. It makes me want to shake these people and tell them that some books have ideas in them that are LESS THAN 2000 YEARS OLD!!!
Well, I guess I need to get my booklist included in that site, because I’m probably a counter-case for lots of the books cited above. I own at least one book by John Piper, have read others online, and am working my way through his completely amazing series of sermons on Romans on my mp3 player.
But, I also own/have owned/have read and enjoyed william Gibson, Stephen King, Douglas Adams, Robert Heinlein, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick, and Anne McCaffrey, just to pick some “unsuggested” names from Piper’s most popular book.
Seriously, though… if you’ve ever wondered what Christianity is *really* about, go listen to Piper’s series on Romans.
Lord of the Rings doesn’t seem to have any Christian books in its unsuggestions, although curiously, it has The Hobbit plus the Lord of the Rings.
I’ve read (almost) two “opposites”: The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (a Christian apologetics book, I read the older edition) and Interview with the Vampire.