Archive for the ‘recommendations’ Category

Tuesday, December 11th, 2018

Top Five Books of 2018

Every year we make a list of the top five books every LT staff member has read this year. You can see past years’ lists here.

We also like seeing your favorite reads, so we compiled a list that all of LibraryThing can add to. We’re interested in not just the most read books of 2018, but the best of the best. What were your top five for this year? Note: books on this list weren’t necessarily published in 2018—these are the best we’ve read this year, regardless of publication date.

» List: Top Five Books of 2018—Add your own!

Without further ado, here are our staff favorites!


Abby

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. If you want to feel gutted by excellent literature, this is the book for you.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney. I love this book, this flaneuse, this love letter to New York, with its exquisite prose and heartbreaking history of one strong woman. I love this cover. And I love Lillian Boxfish. “The structure of the city is the structure of a dream. And me, I have been a long time drifting.”

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung. Phenomenal. Incredibly poignant memoir about adoption, family, race, and just being a human.

Who Is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht. This is the queer lady spy novel of my dreams.

The Calculating Stars: A Lady Astronaut Novel by Mary Robinette Kowal. In an alternate history where a meteorite strikes DC in 1952, bringing on the kind of climate change that could make earth uninhabitable, Elma is a mathematician and former WWII pilot who becomes involved in the space program. I cannot even begin to say how much I loved this book.

Honorable mentions
Honorable mention to the Rivers of London series which I discovered and then devoured this year.


Loranne

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. Really great sci-fi that prods at the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and what a history of oppression does to people, set in space. The protagonist, Aster, is unlike any other I’ve read. Manages to feel very personal, while taking aim at the entire society Solomon has built here. Everyone should read it.

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey. Sci-fi but with lots of feelings. About a team prepping for a mission to mars, and how that impacts them and their families. Made me want to call my mom a lot.

Circe by Madeline Miller. Fans of Miller’s equally excellent previous work (The Song of Achilles) will come for the beautiful writing; everyone should stay for the righteous wrath of a witch scorned.

The Quick by Lauren Owen. This book keeps changing what it is: first it’s a Secret Garden-style childhood mope, then it’s a Young Man off to The City to Seek His Fortune, then oh wait, it’s a love story! And that’s all before the vampires show up and things get really interesting.

The Wicked + the Divine. A comic I’ve been reading for the last five years that’s drawing to a close. Great writing, great art. Every 90 years, 12 gods (from different pantheons) are reincarnated as young people—this time around, they’re pop star archetypes: Lucifer/David Bowie, Inanna/Prince, Amaterasu/Florence Welch, and so on. Mythology nerds will enjoy.

Loranne’s… mentions?

The Power by Naomi Alderman. I had such high hopes for this one, having heard rave reviews: women everywhere develop the power to electrocute via their hands. It was ultimately a disappointment: great writing, cool premise, but completely glosses over even the existence of trans/non-binary folks. What’s worse than ignoring people who don’t fit the strict gender binary: there’s a total fakeout—could have explored that character and had it be very interesting, but discarded them instead.

Crosstalk by Connie Willis. A book club read I just couldn’t get through. Maybe if you’re not into social media, don’t write a “romance” that hinges on it? Reminded me of The Circle (and that’s not a good thing).


Tim

Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology by Eric H. Cline. I started out disliking this book, whose early chapters go over much of the ground of Gods, Graves, Scholars, but not as entertainingly. It grew on me, and won my heart when it profiled an archaeologist (George Bass) I worked with once upon a time. It may not be perfect, but it’s so far as I know it’s a unique thing—an comprehensive, accessible, scholarly overview of world archaeology. Cat, meet catnip.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter. I love McWhorter. I just love him. That is all.

The Winged Watchman by Hilda Van Stockum. A children’s book I listened to with Liam and Lisa. It’s something of a lost classic—a story of a rural Dutch family during the German occupation that is both exciting and, in the end, true to the pervasive horror and occasional mercies of the period.

In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World by Christian Marek. I’m still working my way through this, a nearly 1,000-page summary of Anatolian history. No doubt it would be dry to some. As someone whose deepest historical and archaeological interests coincide perfectly with the topic, it is quite the opposite. The parts I know already read like rereading an old love letter, and the parts that are new to me make my hair stand on end.

Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church by John W. O’Malley. John O’Malley, SJ is best known for his work on the early Jesuits (see my 2017 top-five list). In recent years he’s taken up the ecumenical councils, including a rather good basic lecture series, a history of Trent, and a history of Vatican II (on my 2011 top-five list). His history of Vatican I is similarly good, and oddly appropriate to the moment. This is all my attempt to make up for having attended Georgetown when O’Malley was teaching, not taking any of his class and indeed being completely ignorant of who he was.

Dishonorable mention

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. In my 2014 list I gave Engines of God a dishonorable mention, writing “Why do I bother reading science fiction?” In 2013 I wrote “I love good science fiction, but most of it is crap,” and proceeded to disparage Wool, The Black Cloud, Children of God, and The Midwich Cuckoos. The year before, I said the same of The Kraken Wakes. In recent years Annihilation and The Maze Runner got the stick. I think you can see where I’m going with this one. Certainly, the idea of The Three-Body Problem is clever, but Cixin, Wyndham, McDevitt and the rest: that’s not enough.


Kate

Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol by Ann Dowsett Johnston. I’ve read a great number of recovery memoirs (voyeurism? curiosity? something in between?), but this addition to the genre stands alone, at least for me. While Johnston shares pieces of her story and journey to sobriety, she also incorporates the results of years of research on the subject of women and drinking. I spent half the time reading this book with my jaw unhinged, my mouth hanging open in disbelief, and the other half reading statistics and other data aloud to my husband. I don’t think I’ve highlighted a book this much since graduate school.

The Incendiaries: A Novel by R.O. Kwon. I first heard this book mentioned on the Forever35 podcast by Doree Shafrir as “cults + North Korea + The Secret History,” which was all I needed to hear. I read The Incendiaries in a single sitting, which is definitely a testament to its excellence as I have two kids under four years old. Honestly, it exceeded expectations.

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays by Samantha Irby. Samantha Irby is a delight, y’all. I have *never* laughed so hard reading a book. Like, snort-laughing, gasping-for-air-crying. But beware that this book is essays isn’t all laughs: Irby is just as adept at discussing the difficulties of life, of which she’s had more than her fair share.

Educated by Tara Westover. Westover’s memoir of growing up in a survivalist, Mormon family and making her way to Cambridge for a PhD is as shocking as it is impressive. Although her strength, tenacity, and intelligence are laudable, I was perhaps most impressed by how delicately and respectfully she portrayed her family—even those who have obviously done her wrong.

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith. My personal favorite Cormoran Strike novel. I’m a fan of Galbraith/Rowling and I couldn’t put this one down. As my father-in-law put it upon finishing the lengthy novel: “No wonder it took her so long!”


KJ

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio. A murder mystery/campus novel/Shakespeare homage, this gem isn’t for everybody, but if you like even one of those genres, give it a try. Familiarity with Shakespearean tragedies helpful.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer. This Pulitzer winner is a deceptively small novel about a mid-career gay novelist on a scrimped together round-the-world trip. In addition to its hilarious, beautiful language, I loved how it delicately demonstrates the monumental changes travel can engender in a person.

Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat. If I ever become even a halfway decent home cook, it will be because of Samin. Also, there’s a really great Netflix series and the illustrations are gorgeous.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee. This collection of essays by one of my favorite authors covers everything from Chee’s rose garden in Brooklyn, his time as waiter for the ultra-rich, and his activism in San Francisco amid the AIDS crisis in the 80s. Come for the solid lessons on craft, stay for the illustration of a fully-lived life.

Circe by Madeline Miller. Miller made a splash with her debut novel Song of Achilles, an adaptation of The Iliad through the lens of the love of Achilles and Patroclus. Now, she tackles The Odyssey through the eyes of the witch Circe in a moving, righteously angry, and emotionally loaded interrogation of women’s place in Ancient Greece, and now.

Honorable mentions

The oeuvre of James Rollins I’ve spent most of this year on the road, and Rollins’ action thrillers made planes and buses and ferries pass more quickly. Think Dan Brown morphed with Michael Creighton with some Indiana Jones for good measure.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. What Abby said, above. Only didn’t make my top five because it’s in hers.


Chris C.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford.

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin.

Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith.


Kristi

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A compact, powerful message that must be read, broadcast, and the lessons heavily applied to the world. Read. This. Book.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. I devoured this book. The characters had depth, the stories blended together seamlessly, a page-turning plot structure…very well done.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. I was a little skeptical of how Gaiman would make retellings of Norse mythology interesting…silly me. A delightful little collection.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. Great read. I loved the mundane observations Lahiri’s characters added to the overall theme of each short story. Definitely gave me more knowledge and insight into a culture I needed to learn more about—I’ll surely be looking for more.

Winter of the Gods by Jordanna Max Brodsky. Another fun read in the Olympus Bound trilogy, a modern NYC crime series intertwined with Greek mythology. The shortcomings I’ve found in this series, for me (the endings that drag on a bit and the characters that aren’t as well-developed as I’d like), are saved well enough by the good research Brodsky puts into her writing.


Kirsten

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. Narrated by the author, this novel told in verse is at once a very easy read and an incredibly powerful one. I bought the hardcover after finishing the audiobook because like a book of poetry but unlike most novels, I really wanted to be able to mark it up and revisit certain passages.

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. I’m not much for zombies, but I’m very glad I made the exception for this one. For fans of Gail Carriger, Mackenzi Lee, and NK Jemisin, and anyone who enjoys a rollicking, fast-moving historical reimagining with whip-smart characters. Justina Ireland also gives real good Twitter.

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. As with much of my reading this year, I didn’t know anything about this beyond reading a brief summary before listening to it (Scribd is proving quite excellent for book roulette), and I was blown away. It was intense, and also beautiful, empowering, heartbreaking, infuriating, and inspiring. It’s one that has stayed with me and which I think of often.

The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty. This author-narrated audiobook was both a joy to listen to, and a sobering recollection of one Black man’s ancestors and the lives they endured. In the afterword, Twitty acknowledges that the book is a complete mishmash of genres: he is apologetic about it, however, while I find it to be one of the book’s greatest strengths. Part culinary memoir, part history lesson, part spiritual journey, all heart.

How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by NK Jemisin. Nothing like a surprise December title to shake up the annual top 5. This short story collection exceeded any expectations I might have had if I’d known it was coming before the day it was actually released. The variety in themes, landscapes, and characters’ experiences and demographics is incredibly refreshing in a genre that can often feel like authors are revisiting past successes or giving their take on a story that’s been told time and time again. The audiobook was top-notch, and I’ll be seeking out a couple of the narrators so I can stalk their work forever. The first and last stories in particular were fascinating and exquisitely performed.

Honorable mentions

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I’ve been told for years that I should read this, and to everyone who said so, you were right.

Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi. Mafi’s lyrical prose and Bronson Pinchot’s narration are a perfect match.

Dishonorable mentions

Julie & Julia. This books has EVERYTHING: slurs against mental illness, disparaging terms for folks with disabilities, fatphobia… hard pass, thanks. Just… wow.

The Essex Serpent. I bailed on this one despite high hopes because of the increasingly icky-feeling use of an autistic-coded character as a plot device.


Chris H.

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor.

The Mechanic’s Tale by Steve Matchett.

More?

Tell us about your favorites for 2018 on Talk, or add your own Top Five to our list!

Labels: holiday, lists, reading, recommendations, top five

Wednesday, December 20th, 2017

Top Five Books of 2017

Every December, LT staff members compile a list of our top five favorite books we’ve read this year. You can see past years’ lists here.

We also like seeing members’ favorite reads, so we compiled a list that all of LibraryThing can add to. We’re interested in not just the most read books of 2017, but the best of the best. What were your top five for this year? Note: books on this list weren’t necessarily published in 2017—these are the best we’ve read this year, regardless of publication date.

» List: Top Five Books of 2017—Add your own!

Without further ado, here are our staff favorites!


KJ

Hunger by Roxane Gay
This memoir is both baldly honest and achingly human. Gay writes in her forthright manner about her lifelong relationship with her body and soul, pointing her incisive lens on how fat women experience a deeply prejudiced world.

Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan by Ruth Gilligan
Combining two of the world’s great storytelling cultures, Gilligan’s book about Jewish people in Ireland in the 20th century, told through three intertwining stories, strikes a unique and heartfelt note.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
This collection of connected short stories really nails the unique interpersonal conflicts of small town Maine better than any book I’ve ever read, except perhaps a couple Stephen King novels.

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee
This author’s first book (he’s better known for his second, The Queen of the Night), which details the fallout from a sexually abusive choir conductor, contains the spectrum of human emotions in spare, wrenching prose, and some lush descriptions of Maine landscapes as well.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
The book I have been physically pressing upon every woman in my life who has ever been called “kinda intense.” Machado’s short story collection uses the format of gothic tales to interrogate the daily visceral horrors of women living under a patriarchy which is both distant and intimate at the same time. My favorite? “Eight Bites,” a.k.a. the answer to the question: “where does the fat go after bariatric surgery?”

KJ’s honorable mentions:
Honorable mentions go to the fantasy books that helped me through the hard parts of this year: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (Note from Abby: this book is utterly charming, the perfect balm to the insanity of 2017), The City of Brass, and The Queen’s Thief series.


Loranne

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
I read the entirety of Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy this year, back-to-back-to-back, and if I’m being 100% honest, those three books would all be in my Top Five. But I wanted to give a special nod to the second installment, for knocking my socks off where other middle-of-the-trilogy books often fall short. If you like inventive fantasy, with rich, unique worlds, or if you just like rocks, definitely give her work a shot.

Touch by Claire North
This was one of the most fun, compelling books I read all year. A sci-fi thriller about a centuries-old entity that can take over a person’s body via touch, and who finds theirself being hunted down.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Smart, well-written, hard sci-fi set around China’s Cultural Revolution. Full of wonderfully complex characters and a unique premise—once you figure out what’s really going on.

Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan
If a 1980s girl gang of newspaper deliverers + time travel doesn’t sound like an awesome, wild ride, then this probably isn’t the comic for you. If it does…

Injection by Warren Ellis
My favorite creepy, weird comic about a group of geniuses who unleash an AI onto the Internet, and what it does once it settles in.

Loranne’s dishonorable mentions:

  • Armada by Ernest Cline: Meet “All the pop culture references that couldn’t be crammed into Ready Player One: The Novel”. I’m not much of an RPO fan to begin with, but attempting to read this one (my only DNF this year!) makes me actively dislike RPO in retrospect.
  • Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari: A big ol’ NOPE. What a slog that amounted to nothing.

Abby

Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly
A fantasy world with gay spies and smugglers in an eerily prescient fascist state.

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey
A fantastic but somewhat quiet character study of astronauts during a simulation of a mission to Mars. (Note from KJ: cosigned from the resident company space opera nerd.)

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
This book has everything. It’s an Ocean’s Eleven-esque heist, with magic, and with maps in the front. (I’m a sucker for a book with a map in the front.)

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
Murder mystery + theater students who are both incredibly pretentious and undeniably human + so much Shakespeare. Glorious.

The Unseen World by Liz Moore
This book is smart, and heartbreaking. If your motto is like mine, “get wrecked by literature,” read this.

Abby’s honorable mentions:

  • The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone: The amazing story of Elizabeth Friedman, one of the first code-breakers, whose achievements are buried in history behind those of her husband.

Kate

Honestly, I would have an easier time of listing the five books I disliked most this year (I’m looking at you, Lincoln in the Bardo). Turns out 2017 was difficult for a lot of folks! Add a newborn and a toddler to the mix and my year in reading was less than stellar. I did, however, read every single children’s book published, so here’s my top five in children’s literature:

Supertruck by Stephen Savage
We love all of Savage’s books, but my son especially loves this one. And the dedication definitely didn’t* make me cry.
(*it did)

Dog on a Frog? by Kes Gray
Silly rhymes, which led to lots of laughs.

Gaston by Kelly Dipucchio
A cute book that challenges what it means to fit in, complete with great illustrations, and dialogue which necessitated my horrid, exaggerated french accent which made my son howl with laughter. Plus dogs!

Extremely Cute Animals Operating Heavy Machinery by David Gordon
My sons is crazy about trucks—to the point that we’ve exhausted our library’s vehicle-centric kids’ collection. This one popped up a few weeks ago and he loved it: animals, trucks, and a sneaky lesson about forgiveness.

Everyone by Christopher Silas Neal
Sparse and beautifully illustrated, my son had LOTS to say about this one.

Kate’s honorable mentions:


Kirsten

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore
I had no idea when I started this book that it would be one I consider potentially life-changing YA. Featuring protagonists with intersectional identities; questions of culture, gender, sexuality, and family; a healthy dose of magical realism and unique prose, I wish it had been around 20 years ago for teenage Kirsten to read.

The Lightning-Struck Heart by TJ Klune
Look, I’ve boiled this down to a simple pitch: it is at once the raunchiest and most wholesome thing I’ve ever read. This book has everything: wizards, a royal family, sexually aggressive dragons, a hornless gay unicorn—need I go on?

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Listened to this on audio—Bahni Turpin’s pacing probably isn’t for everyone, but her delivery was perfect throughout. This is a very accessible story about police brutality, race relations between classes, and living one’s truth. Recommend to absolutely everyone.

The High King’s Golden Tongue by Megan Derr
Yep, more MM romance fantasy, because 2017. I loved the characters in this one, as well as Derr’s decision to center a linguist as necessary to successful governance. Another fun romp, a bit less absurd than the Klune, but no less enjoyable.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Beautifully told stories of intricately interwoven lives, over seven generations of a family. Do recommend looking up the family chart if you listen to it on audio.

Kirsten’s honorable mentions:


Tim

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Lockwood by turns dazzles and drives me nuts. Either way, I’m sure to remember the characters that inhabit her breakthrough memoir—the strangest and most interesting of whom may be the author. The next State of the Thing newsletter will include my interview with her.

The Samurai by Shusaku Endo
Silence made my list last year, in anticipation of the Scorcese movie. Samurai is a much “larger” book, and might have made a more successful movie.

A History of Britain by Simon Schama
Especially volume three (1776–2000). Help me, I’m turning into my Dad. Schama was one of a number of British history books I read this year. Also memorable—and even more of a Dad-read—was Lukacs’s The Duel: The 80-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler.

John W. O’Malley The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present and St. Ignatius Loyola and the Remarkable History of the First Jesuits.
After Georgetown, devouring a raft of “Jesuits in Space” novels, and experiencing the first Jesuit Pope, it was time to do a deep dive into Ignatius and his order.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
I read and/or listened to a number of books with my eleven year-old son this year. Hatchet was one of the stand-outs.

Tim’s dishonorable mentions:
This year was marked by as many duds as successes. A few deserve special mention.

  • Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari: What a terrible follow-up to Sapiens—or rather, a magnification of everything flip and cliched in Sapiens, without any of its interest.
  • The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher: Dreher is asking some of the right questions, and he started a necessary conversation. But his answers are mostly wrongheaded—and frequently gross.
  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer: How on earth did this win the Nebula? If this is the best, why bother?
  • The Maze Runner by James Dashner: Now and then I like to read a celebrated YA book. This one’s a stinker.

Kristi

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
This sensuous historical romance chronicles the evolution of Nancy Astley, an oyster girl who follows her beloved male impersonator to the theatres of London. The abrupt end to their romance is just the beginning for “Nan King,” who discovers other parts of herself—and other lovers—in Victorian England.

Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou
Incredible tale of an orphan from Loango who flees to Pointe-Noire at 13, and experiences a myriad of adventures, trials, and tribulations.

The High House by James Stoddard
High fantasy starring the newest steward of Evenmere mansion. Evenmere holds the power to the universe, quite literally, and our hero must protect it from those who seek to endr reality as we know it.

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc
A creepy thriller! A young couple’s relationship—and sanity—is tested after moving into their new and suspiciously cheap home in small-town Wisconsin.

In the Woods by Tana French
Det. Ryan returns to the woods of his Dublin hometown to investigate the murder of a 12-year-old girl. The case resembles one in 1984, where Ryan and two friends went missing: he was found with no memory of what happened. Now, he must try to remember…


Chris C.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
I found this oldie but goodie absolutely fascinating and eye-opening. Offers an insightful history of the world’s cultures from a variety of different angles.

Stranges in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild
An account of a writer’s journey to understand a part of the US she doesn’t personally “get.”

Numbers and the Making of Us by Caleb Everett
A fascinating look at the way numbers have shaped societies and human development from a technological and linguistic point of view. I particularly loved the linguistic aspects.

Sicily: A Literary Guide for Travellers by Andrew Edwards
A tour through Sicily from a literary point of view, visiting important Sicilian writers’ towns and explaining some of Sicily’s variety through a history of it’s literature.

Agile Data Science by Russell Jurney
An introduction to a set of tools and practices for processing large amounts of data and producing visualizations and/or predictions from that data.


Pedro

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Radical Candor by Kim Scott Malone

The Weekly Coaching Conversation by Brian Souza

More?

Tell us about your favorites for 2017 on Talk, or add your own Top Five to our list!

Labels: holiday, lists, reading, recommendations, top five

Tuesday, December 20th, 2016

Top Five Books of 2016

Every December, LT staff members compile a list of our top five favorite books we’ve read this year. You can see past years’ lists here.

We also like seeing members’ favorite reads, so we compiled a list that all of LibraryThing can add to. We’re interested in not just the most read books of 2016, but the best of the best. What were your top five for 2016? Note: books on this list weren’t necessarily published in 2016—these are the best we’ve read this year, regardless of publication date.

»List: Top Five Books of 2016—Add your own!

Without further ado, here are our staff favorites!


Kate

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Hands down, the most devastating, beautiful book I’ve ever read. This is now the benchmark by which I judge all other “sad” books. Should come with a button which reads “I survived A Little Life.”

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
Since finishing this book I’ve been waiting for something, anything to live up to it. No dice yet.

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
I attended Lindy’s reading in St. Louis at Left Bank Books and, y’all, she is a force with which to be reckoned. Inspiring, thoughtful, and funny.

The Girls by Emma Cline
I read this on a trip to California and it was the perfect choice. Cline did an amazing job capturing the insecurity and loneliness of being a young teenaged girl, and the resulting motivations for action.

The Trespasser by Tana French
Not my favorite installment of the Dublin Murder Squad, but it’s still Tana French, y’all. Her writing is best.


Loranne

March: Book One by John Lewis
Representative John Lewis’s personal account of his life as part of the Civil Rights Movement should be read by everyone. It’s intense, and Nate Powell’s black and white art is used to great effect to build on Lewis’s story.

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
This wrapped up Leckie’s Imperial Raadch trilogy, and it hit all the right notes. Continuing to probe at what is left in the wake of an imperial steamroller, and pushing all my “robots are people, too” buttons, it was heart-tugging and funny, and left me wanting more of this universe.

Monstress, Vol. 1 by Marjorie Liu
Sana Takeda’s work on Monstress is hands-down some of the most beautiful art in current comics out there, and the world the co-creators have built is rich and intriguing.

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

The Memory Garden by Mary Rickert

Loranne’s honorable mentions:

  • The Trespasser by Tana French
  • Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang: The only reason this one isn’t in my Top Five proper is because I’m not done with it yet! Chiang’s stories are intimate and thought-provoking, and, if you like reading books movies are based on, the title piece—”Story of Your Life”—can’t be beat, as the inspiration for the movie Arrival.

KJ

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
This narrative, which follows 5 generations of a family separated in the 18th century by the Atlantic slave trade, is a book I have physically shoved into multiple people’s hands. Alternating perspectives between American and Ghanaian descendents of two sisters, it touches on the histories of those countries through the eyes of ordinary people.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
This memoir/academic research/musings/fragment collection explores how to make a queer romance, and a family, in a world where there are no solid models for either of those endeavors. This stuck with me for weeks.

Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones
In 2014, I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Jones read aloud a few of the poems in this collection about a black gay man coming of age in the American South, but only got around to reading the whole thing this summer. My two favorites are: “Sleeping Arrangement” and “Pretending to Drown.”

Glorify by Emily C. Heath
This came to me at exactly a time when I needed a breath of fresh air into my faith. Rev. Heath suggests a refocusing for the progressive church centered in discipleship, and offers compelling reasons why. My mom, my church’s Lenten reading series, and many others also enjoyed reading and discussing it.

The City Watch Series by Terry Pratchett
I had dabbled in Sir Terry before, but had the opportunity to plow my way through Loranne’s copy of the City Watch books early this year, and enjoyed it mightily. I laughed; I cried; I developed a fondness for parenthetical footnotes. For a series of fantasy books, they really nail down issues that are perpetually present in the real world, pointing out political hypocrisies and themes. My favorite was probably Feet of Clay. Will re-read again, definitely.

KJ’s honorable mentions:
Gender Failure by Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and Pocket, which helped me read >30k words a day of election coverage for 10 months on my phone without killing my eyesight. My soul, yes, but my eyes are fine.


Tim

The Great Poets by Gerard Manley Hopkins
I encountered Hopkins in my 20s and dismissed him as cramped—how wrong I was! I listened to him again between Boston and Portland, and almost drove off the road in unexpected pleasure. I haven’t discovered a poet I love this much in a decade.

Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction by David C. Catling
A nice break from my usual interests; utterly fascinating, and surprisingly handy for understanding this year’s glut of astrobiology stories.

Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction by Amanda H. Podany
This was the year I got addicted to Oxford’s “A Very Short Introduction” series—can you tell? Despite all the classics and archaeology, by ANE knowledge was pretty scattered. This tied it all together for me, and led to further exploration. Other titles, such as the Ancient Egypt one, weren’t as satisfying.

Silence by Shusaku Endo
Can I add something I’m still reading? I can tell it’s going to be a favorite.

The Stolen Child by Lisa Carey
I’m not exactly unbiased here—my wife is the author and the book is dedicated to me and Liam. So read what Abby wrote.


Abby

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Utterly devastating and literally heartbreaking. And beautiful. This book made me sob uncontrollably while on a plane (the stranger sitting next to me never commented, at least), and then proceeded to give me a book hangover where I was unable to read anything else for a month after.

The Stolen Child by Lisa Carey
Magical and creepy and lovely. I love Lisa and I’m (probably) going to love anything she writes, but this was particularly amazing.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith
I love books with multiple timelines that piece together at the end, and this did it perfectly.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Speaking of twisting narratives that weave into a complex awesome puzzle… I should have read this two years ago when KJ first told me to and I refused to believe all the hype. I was wrong.

The Green Road by Anne Enright

Abby’s honorable mentions:
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, and the fantastical wonderful world of Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle books (but in particular The Raven King).


Kristi

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
I am one of those awful people who has seen the movies but not read the books, until now. I decided I shouldn’t postpone any longer. Not that Rowling’s writing needs it, but Jim Dale made this book even easier to read. Looking forward to Book three! I didn’t skip Book two, don’t worry!

Love in the Asylum by Lisa Carey
Loved this book! Lisa’s provocative—in a good way—story-telling made this an interesting & easy read. The characters’ thoughts, gestures, and interactions are real, relatable, and I quickly settled into the story. Great read. Bonus: historical (fiction) story within the story.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Another must-read for fantasy lovers. It was a cute, easy read that, though I think I would have appreciated it more when I was 10, is still an automatic classic.

The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
This book is the argument for authentically natural farming—farming that follows most closely the behavior of nature. A short, good read that I’ll likely reference while planning my own garden!

No Death, No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh
Like just about every other human being, death is sometimes a challenging concept for me. This piece is a great meditation on how to define death, and how to remove fear from the inevitable. Worth the reflection.

Chris C.

The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos
I can’t recommend this book enough. I found it absolutely fascinating and revealing.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

Quiet: The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer


Mike

The Trespasser by Tana French
Latest book in Tana French’s “Dublin murder squad” series. Not my favorite of the series, but definitely not my least favorite either.

The Blood Mirror by Brent Weeks
Book 4 of the “lightbringer” series. I was disappointed by book three, so wasn’t expecting very much, but really enjoyed this book. Looking forward to the fifth and final book!

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene
I was taking a physics course this year, so this book was a great supplement to some of the stuff we starting to learn in class, but with more detail/focus on cosmological physics concepts.

The Whispering City by Sara Moliner
Murder mystery/thriller set in 1950s Barcelona!

Storm Front by Jim Butcher
I always wanted to start this series, but never got around to it. Figured I might as well dig in while on vacation in Puerto Rico. Didn’t disappoint! A bit cheesy, but you kind of expect that from a noir private investigator/wizard series.

Kirsten

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Achingly beautiful, and a wonderful narration by Frazer Douglas. This has been my before bed soundtrack pretty much since I first listened to it: I must have listened to the whole thing 5+ times through by now.

The Stolen Child by Lisa Carey
Even if I didn’t know and adore the author, this would have been one of my picks. You really feel like you’re a part of the world she builds, and the touch of magical realism plus these turns of phrase that made me stop reading and just think—gorgeous.

Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan E. Coyote
In case I didn’t already have a massive crush on Ivan Coyote.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
This was a total surprise. I’d seen the book featured in the window of a local shop for a while, and was looking for a new audiobook when this title popped up. By turns funny and bemusing and sweet, it’s just a damned good book.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis
A really difficult but hugely illuminating book. Listening to Angela Davis narrate it made it that much more powerful. Very timely and a quick read, highly recommend to everyone.

Kirsten’s honorable mentions:

Chris H.

Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson
A great (albeit extremely detailed) history of the computer. Featuring Einstein, von Neumann, WWII, Turing, the Manhattan Project, Eckert, Mauchly, Princeton Institute for Advanced Research, etc.

The Matthew Shardlake Series by C.J. Sansom
I’m a sucker for medieval mysteries and these are a lot of fun.

Grunt by Mary Roach
Because I tend to love anything that Mary Roach writes about. She goes in-depth into each subject she investigates and comes out with fun, interesting stories that are great for creating conversations around. See also: Packing for Mars or Bonk.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Do yourself a favor and read the book and skip the rather boring movie. The book has a great sense of humor (humour?), although it gets a little strung out towards the end. I enjoy hiking and would love to do the App Trail at some point, but reading this book will have to do for now.


Pedro

Um Estranho em Goa by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Site Reliability Engineering by Betsy Beyer

Maus by Art Spiegelman

More?

Tell us about your favorites for 2016 on Talk, or add your own Top Five to our list!

Labels: holiday, lists, reading, recommendations, top five

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015

Top Five Books of 2015

Every December, LT staff members compile a list of our top five favorite books we’ve read this year. You can see past years’ lists here.

We also like seeing members’ favorite reads, so we compiled a list that all of LibraryThing can add to. We’re interested in not just the most read books of 2015, but the best of the best. What were your top five for 2015? Note: books on this list weren’t necessarily published in 2015—these are the best we’ve read this year, regardless of publication date.

»List: Top Five Books of 2015—Add your own!

Without further ado, here are our staff favorites!


Abby

Euphoria by Lily King

Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans
This is one of the most unusal and unexpectedly lovely WWII stories I’ve read.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
Only Sarah Vowell can write a history of Lafayette (Everyone give it up for America’s favorite fighting Frenchman!) that mentions the recasting of Darrin on Bewitched.

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer

What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn


Loranne

Among Others by Jo Walton
My only regret is that I didn’t discover this one sooner. An amazingly well-written book about loss and how the narrator deals when her identity is ripped away from her at a young age. That somehow manages to not be too depressing. It also helps that the narrator is an avid reader, and the book is full of references to (real) books she’s read.

In Real Life by Cory Doctorow
Short (for me), simple (in terms of plot), and moving. Plus, Jen Wang’s illustrations are lovely.

Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey
I read all of The Expanse series (so far) in about two months. Each book was better than the last, and this one was no exception.

Bitch Planet, Vol. 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Loranne’s honorable mentions:

  • The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller: So well-written. I laughed; I cried; I mostly cried. Because we all know how this one’s going to end.
  • The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin: This was a SantaThing gift I received last year, and it was such an amazing pick that I probably would have missed on my own. I have a sneaking suspicion that Jemisin’s latest, The Fifth Season, will make my 2016 list.

Kirsten

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes

One of my favorite movies (and books), this memoir specifically about the making of The Princess Bride was an excellent listen. Cary Elwes narrates the majority, but
Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Mandy Patinkin, Bill Goldman, and Rob Reiner all read from their interviews from the book.

Seeker by Arwen Dayton

Combining archaic, steampunk, and modern technologies, while deftly bringing the main characters’ stories together through dedicated chapters, this truly is the best new fantasy I’ve read in some time.

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

I enjoyed this one more the further I got into it. By the last page, I was ready for the next book in the series. While I was wary of another retelling of Oz, it was well done and didn’t feel tired.

Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Son by Lois Lowry


Tim

A bad year for fiction, except for all the books I read or reread with my son (e.g., Holes, Hobit, Heinlein).

Blue Guide Istanbul by John Freely
This and Freely’s others got my family though Isanbul.

The Fall of Constantinople by Steven Runciman
Great book, but especially so since it formed the structure of an hour-long retelling of the Fall that I did with my son, over dinner in the Galata tower, overlooking the action.

What Philosophy Can Do by Gary Gutting
Should be required reading for everyone who argues onlne.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
I cast around for good science fiction, and rarely find it. So I was expecting to drop this after a few chapters. It’s a much better book than that.

The Classical Tradition by Anthony Grafton
A huge, new encyclopedia of the reception of Antiquity—hugely enjoyable, but perhaps not for all.


Kate

Find Me by Laura van den Berg

A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell
Delightfully strange story I picked up as an ARC at ALAMW14. It stayed with me long after I finished it.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
TBC is the last book I read before giving birth to my son and I’m SO GLAD it was good enough to hold me over until I had the brain capactiy to once again read.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling
Kaling’s second effort outshines her first. While her first book focused on what guys should wear to look hot, her second is a collection of opinions on being a successful woman and not apologizing for it. And also gossip. It was delightful.

Kate’s honorable mentions:
Blackout: The Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola


Chris H.

The Martian by Andy Weir

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
I live on random knowledge and this book was chock full of the stuff. Loved it.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
One of the more beautifully written books that I’ve read in a while.

Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey


KJ

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker
The author puts my heart into words, when it comes to planes and the heart-longing-lonliness of why we travel. Reminded me how much I once wanted to be a pilot.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
Much like a perennial favorite of mine, The Manticore by Roberston Davies, his person’s trip through therapy was therapeutic in itself to read. I also highly recommend the related (Tony winning) book/musical Fun Home, if you like using theater to feel big feelings.

1914 by Jean Echenoz

The Green Road by Anne Enright
I’m always a sucker for dysfunctional Irish families and also “enduring holidays with people you don’t like” narratives, so this was perfect.

KJ’s honorable mentions:


Mike

The Secret Place by Tana French
Everything in the Dublin Murder Mysteries series is good, and this is no exception. Great read, great character development.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
I read all 3 of the Cormoran Strike novels this year. All of them were great detective stories, but the first was my favorite.

Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith

The Broken Eye by Brent Weeks
The third book in Brent Week’s Lightbringer saga. Not as great as the other two, but keeps the story going with enough cliffhangers to want to read the next installment.


Seth

The Martian by Andy Weir

Abomination by Gary Whitta

Egghead: Or, You Can’t Survive on Ideas Alone by Bo Burnham

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

Movie Title Typos: Making Movies Better by Subtracting One Letter by Austin Light


Chris C.

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco
A classic anyone who develops software in an organization should read.

The Musician’s Way by Gerald Klickstein

Data Scientists at Work by Sebastian Gutierrez
Interesting read especially about the mindset of people working in this field.

The Jazz Bass Book by John Goldsby

Becoming a Better Programmer by Pete Goodliffe
How could I get any better? Seriously though, a helpful collection of essays or lessons focusing on various aspects of the software development process.


Kristi

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
This was a fun YA read, and I probably liked it so much because it was the first fiction book I’ve read in a *long* time. It was also reminiscent of a lot of the fantasy novels I read as a kid. I had a pretty long stint of reading non-fiction, DIY, and self-help books. Happy that my Secret Santa from last year’s SantaThing awarded me this book! Will definitely be reading more from this series.

Slade House by David Mitchell

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
This was my first novel by Waters, and it won’t be my last. Waters’ writing immerses you into the time where the novel is set, her attention to detail draws you into the story in a way that only a skillful writer can. Excellent character development.

Symphony for the City of the Dead by M.T. Anderson
What an interesting aspect of WWII research. This historical novel looked at the war through the lens of music and its influence on entire cultures and nations. Not just any music, but that of the famous Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, peering into his entire tumultuous, revolutionary life in Leningrad and seeing the common “chord” through it all that never lost Shostakovich’s focus. A passionate story that bolsters music as one of the all-time unifiers in life.


Ammar

You Don’t Know JS: Scope and Closures by Kyle Simpson
Hands down best book(s) on javascript that I have read. Author has the gift of conveying deep and advanced concepts in a concise and compressed manner. A good read for all whether just starting out in javascript or advanced in understanding concepts

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond
3.5 out of 5 stars. While, no doubt, various precious gems can be derived throught this work of Raymond, the text is too bloated with outdated and irrelevant examples

Introduction to Sociology by Anthony Giddens
This was an academic text book and it did the job. I was interested in certain topics and was able to extract useful information regarding those topics

More?

Tell us about your favorites for 2015 on Talk, or add your own Top Five to our list!

Labels: holiday, lists, reading, recommendations, top five

Wednesday, February 4th, 2015

Better recommendations: Display

Over the next week or so we’ll be talking a lot about recommendations on LibraryThing and LibraryThing for Libraries. We’ve been doing a lot of work on this part of the site, and will be rolling out a number of improvements.

Today we’re debuting a new system for showing recommendations on works.

Check it out:

  1. Recommendations page for The Fault in Our Stars
  2. Recommendations page for Archaeology and Language
  3. Work page for Code Name Verity

And come talk about it on Talk.

Details. The first change is to the “brief” display on work pages. We have a new way of showing a “shelf,” with both cover and title. We think this is more appealing—to more users—than the previous text-only system.

Screenshot 2015-02-04 13.51.09

You can expand to “see more,” to get two more rows, then “see all” to get ten or more. The deeper you go the less confident we are that the recommendation is a good one. But our recommendations are often quite good deep.

If it’s not more appealing to you, you can see the recommendations as text, with series “tucked under.”

Screenshot 2015-02-04 13.51.48

If you want to keep it that way, click the “edit” pencil. To keep the number of icons down, you’ll only get this if you click to change views. (Not everyone will like this. I do.)

Screenshot 2015-02-04 13.54.27

Besides “covers” and “text” you can also choose to vote on recommendations, as before.

Screenshot 2015-02-04 13.55.46

The new way of seeing recommendations has transformed the “All recommendations” subpage. (Here’s the ugly, list-y thing it looked like before.) To the various recommendation types we’ve added “More by this author,” which sorts the authors books by their algorithmic similarity to the book in quesiton, and “‘Old’ Combined Recommendations” for members seeking to compare the old algorithms with the new.

As before, this page shows all the different elements that make up LibraryThing’s “main” (or “combined”) recommendations.

Screenshot 2015-02-04 13.58.44

And come talk about it on Talk.

A note on authors and repetition. Algorithmic recommendations are something between a science and an art. There’s a lot of math involved, some of it very complex indeed. But the mathematically “right” answer isn’t much good if it’s boring. So, mathematically, one James Patterson book is statistically most similar to two dozen other James Patterson books before and other author can contribute a book. But who wants to see row after row of that?

Turning math into something stimulating and diverse, yet credible, is complex process. In this case, the same-author problem is addressed not in the initial data, but “at display,” by limiting how many times an author may appear on a given line. You can see this, for example, in the recommendations for The Fault in Our Stars, which restrains John Green from taking over, or Horns, which restrains Joe Hill, but also Steven King, Justin Cronin and others.

Because of differences in screen size, members will now sometimes be presented with slightly different recommendations lists, as books get pushed between rows. We think the drawbacks there are outweighed by the visual benefits of not overloading members wih repetitive recommendations.

Labels: design, new feature, new features, recommendations, Uncategorized

Wednesday, December 17th, 2014

Top Five Books of 2014

It’s become a LibraryThing tradition: as the year draws to a close, LT staff members list of their top five reads (you can see 2013’s list here)—this is our fourth year running!

We also want all members to get in on the fun, so we compiled a list that all of LibraryThing can add to. We’d like to see not just the most read books of 2014, but the best of the best. What were your five favorite reads of 2014? Note: books on this list weren’t necessarily released in 2014. These are just the best we’ve read this year, regardless of publication date.

» List: Top Five Books of 2014 — Add your own.


Without further ado, here’s the wordier breakdown of the staff’s favorites, including some honorable (and dishonorable) mentions:

Abby

The Quick by Lauren Owen

Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

Abby’s honorable mentions:


Loranne

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
This space opera won lots of awards in the last year, and with good reason. It’s not only good sci-fi, but it poses interesting questions about AI, the self, and identity. Well worth a read.

Saga, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan
A sci-fi/fantasy mish-mosh that revolves around an interplanetary civil war, this one finally convinced me to start reading comics regularly.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
I first picked this up a couple years ago, but couldn’t get into it until this year. It’s a bit slow to start, and is as obtuse as any Murakami novel, but I really enjoyed it. If the intersection of “melancholy” and “bizarre” sounds appealing, you should check it out.

Texts from Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg
Imagined text conversations between characters and authors of the classics. I still find myself quoting Ortberg’s version of Achilles sometimes.

Yes Please by Amy Poehler
It was an interesting look into the mind of a woman whose career I greatly admire, and that made it worthwhile for me. I laughed, I cried.

Loranne’s dishonorable mentions:

  • The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty: This skewed a little more YA than my tastes typically lean, so perhaps I should have known better. But, I picked it up for book club and was just kind of disappointed. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
  • The Dog Stars by Peter Heller: Another selection for book club. If I have to read one more book by a male author in which the curves of an inanimate object are likened to those of a woman’s body (either specific or general), I will light something on fire. Aside from that, it wasn’t a bad book, per se, just very much not my thing.

Kirsten

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin


Tim

The books that really stand out, however, read to or with my eight year-old son, Liam. Reading is always a big part of our life, but it was especially so during the two periods when my wife was away at a writing colony. We had a lot of lengthy drives listening to audiobooks, and sometimes even listened to audiobooks during dinner. We’re running out of stuff to read!

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Read it with my son. I had never read it before. It’s a ripping yarn, and it’s main character, Long John Silver, remains a cultural touchstone.

Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
Audiobooked with my son. It’s a classic that appears to have slipped off the classics shelf. That’s too bad. Despite having virtually no action, my son adored it.

Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein
Audiobooked with my son. I have a soft spot for this imperfect juvenile, and we were on a Robinsonade kick. The “let down” (with strong messages about adolescence) were his first exposure to such an ending—and not well received. Tor.com has a good post about it, “Beware of stobor!”.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Hadn’t read it since I was a teenager. It’s better than I remember.

The Martian by Andy Weir
Hugely enjoyable account of an astronaut stranded on Mars. (I’ve audiobooked it three times.) I interviewed the author for our newsletter.

Tim’s dishonorable mentions:

  • The Time Warp Trio series by Jon Scieszka: Not three but sixteen books about three travelleing friends. They’re fine—many steps up from that execrable Magic Tree House series—and I’m glad my son got what amounts to a tour of history. But I hope to never read another sentence by Jon Scieszka.
  • The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt: Why do I bother reading science fiction?
  • The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham*: See above. Boringly sexist too.
  • The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky: It’s pure gold, and doing it by audiobook left me swimming in Dostoyevsky-prose for weeks. But I left off reading in the middle and have to start again; I can’t read something unless I’m fully “up” on it—unless I feel like I’m holding the whole thing in my mind. Maybe next year…

*Perhaps a better question is “Why do I bother reading John Wyndham?” considering The Midwich Cuckoos made Tim’s “dishonorable mentions” last year…


Kate

The Secret Place by Tana French
Tana French is always worth the wait. This book did not disappoint.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith
More Cormoran Strike, please. Vying with French’s Dublin Murder Squad as my favorite series.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
I love an unreliable narrator and already regret giving my copy of this book away.

Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
Biggest surprise of the year for me, especially considering how much I was looking forward to Amy Poehler’s debut, which I’m finally brave enough to say I straight-up hated.

The Quick by Lauren Owen
Thanks to Abby Blachly for the recommendation.


Chris H.

The Last Lion, Vol. 1: Winston Churchill, Visions of Glory by William Manchester

Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129 by Norman Polmar

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie


KJ

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
This is both really long and really sad. I loved it, but it’s hard to recommend to people.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
NOT over-hyped. In a sea of post-apocalyptic throwaway books, this literary novel brought art back to humanity, even after the “end of the world.”

The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner
As a Mainer who loves Shakespeare, I was the perfect audience for this take on King Lear. I shoved it on anyone in my tiny fishing town who would stand still long enough.

Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown
Everyone loves lady pirates, blowing up the unethical opium trade, and lavish descriptions of food preparation. Everyone.

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes
Always here for queering Shakespeare texts.

KJ’s honorable mentions:


Mike

Faithful Place by Tana French

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

While You’re Here, Doc by Bradford B. Brown

The Birth Partner by Penny Simkin

Organic Chemistry I As a Second Language by David R. Klein


Seth

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss

The Walking Dead: Compendium One by Robert Kirkman

The Life of Corgnelius and Stumphrey by Susie Brooks


Chris C.

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Doing Data Science by Rachel Schutt

Statistical Inference for Everyone by Brian S. Blais

Machine Learning with R by Brett Lantz

Unity 4.x Game Development by Example by Ryan Henson Creighton


Kristi

No Death, No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh is such a great writer for those who practice the philosophies of Buddhism. His writing is simple, reflective, and he repeats a lot of the same lessons over so you can internalize those lessons much easier.

Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England by Tom Wessels
This one was a re-read; the illustrations are beautiful! You’ll never look at a New England landscape the same again after reading this book.

Edible Perennial Gardening: Growing Successful Polycultures in Small Spaces by Anni Kelsey
I read this book after buying my first home and taking a permaculture course online. This is a great guide for designing your perennial/permaculture garden! I can’t wait to build my garden at home!

The Elements of Style (Illustrated) by William Strunk
I was recommended this book from a colleague when I asked for good books to improve my writing skills! A great book for the foundations of the English language and writing.

The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health by Robert O. Young
I have continued to read this book over the last year or two, as a way to improve my health and reduce/eliminate my digestive issues. Following the pH diet principles has saved my health!


Ammar

JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford

Code Complete by Steve McConnell

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought by Drew Neil

Rework by Jason Fried

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt

More?

Tell us about your favorites for 2014 on Talk, or add your own Top Five to our list!

Labels: holiday, lists, reading, recommendations, top five

Monday, July 28th, 2014

Summer Reads 2014

Whether lounging on the beach, sipping icy beverages poolside, or retreating into the blissfully air-conditioned depths of the indoors, there’s something truly excellent about reading in the summertime. You have to do something with the extended daylight, anyway, right? I asked the rest of the LT staff to help me compile a list of our favorite summer reads for 2014. Check them out!

» List: Summer Reads 2014—Add your own here!


Tim

  1. The Martian by Andy Weir
  2. Chocky by John Wyndham
  3. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
  4. My wife’s novel (drafts)
  5. Terrible science fiction. Why is so much of it so bad?

Abby

  1. The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
  2. The Quick by Lauren Owen
  3. The Lost Sisterhood by Anne Fortier

Kate

  1. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
  2. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes
  3. Texts from Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg

Mike

  1. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
  2. Dangerous Women by George R. R. Martin
  3. Wild Mammals of New England by Alfred J. Godin

Chris C.

  1. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
  2. Machine Learning with R by Brett Lantz
  3. Head First Statistics by Dawn Griffiths

KJ

  1. Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown
  2. The United States vs Pvt. Chelsea Manning by Clark Stoeckly
  3. The Odyssey by Homer

Loranne

  1. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  2. Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
  3. Robogenesis by Daniel H. Wilson

Jon

  1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
  2. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 by Mark Twain
  3. Transit by Anna Seghers

Kirsten

  1. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
  2. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
  3. Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Matt

  1. The Lion by Nelson Demille
  2. Transfer of Power by Vince Flynn
  3. 11/22/63 by Stephen King

Eddy

  1. Scorpia Rising by Anthony Horowitz
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  3. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

More?

What are your favorite summer reads? Add yours to our list, and join us on Talk!

Labels: lists, reading, recommendations

Thursday, June 19th, 2014

Rate Recommendations

I’ve added a new feature for members to help improve the quality of LibraryThing’s automatic recommendations. It mirrors something we did for author recommendations. This time it’s for works, addressing those times when you see a bum recommendation, or spot a book that’s too low on the list.

You can find the new “Rate Recommendations” feature in the “LibraryThing Recommendations” section of work pages. Click on “Rate Recommendations” and you get the expanded “rating” view.

Screen Shot 2014-06-18 at 11.04.23 PM

Rating is divided into ten boxes.(1) All things being equal, giving something six or more sends the recommendation up, and giving something five or less sends it down. We’re going to see how it develops before finalizing the algorithm, which will remain intentionally obscure.(2)

In addition to appearing on work pages, I’ve also made a page for members to rapidly peruse their works’ recommendations, and chime in on them, without going work page by work page. It keeps track of how many works’ recommendations you rated, among other statistics.

You can find your page here: https://www.librarything.com/profile_raterecommendations.php

Screen Shot 2014-06-18 at 11.08.59 PM

Here’s the Talk post about it. Come tell us what you think!


(1) It’s the same system as five stars, with half stars. Indeed, that was the original system for the author recommendation rating. But we decided it was too much like rating the book.
(2) At present, we’ve giving it a lot of power. This will probably be reduced. Either way, there’ll be factors other than the mere presence of a rating at work.

Labels: new feature, new features, recommendations

Friday, February 14th, 2014

Staff Favorites: Literary Love Stories

In honor of this most love-ly of holidays, I asked the rest of the staff to help me with a roundup of our favorite love stories in literature.

» Go add your favorites to our list here!

And whatever you’re doing for Valentine’s Day, take some advice from Powell’s and Treat Your Shelf(1) to something nice.

Our Favorites

Benedick & Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing
KJ says: It’s the Ur-Romantic Comedy for a reason. Two grumps who detest the concept of Romance are manipulated into showing their feelings by their conspiring friends over a weekend wedding.

Bendrix & Sarah from The End of the Affair
Kate says: Is it in bad taste to pinpoint an affair as a prime example of love? Sorry not sorry.

Jamie & Claire from The Outlander Series
Abby says: It’s the story of an English woman in the 1940s who travels through time to 1740s Scotland—the books are historical fiction mixed with time travel, and of course, a great love story.

Daphnis & Chloe, the eponymous duo from the novel by Longus
Tim says: Sweet and unexpected. If you haven’t read an ancient novel, this is the one to start with.

Everyone from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Matt says: Well, they all end up together at one point or another, really.

Marco & Celia from The Night Circus
Loranne says: A bit of a fairy tale, but very much an affair of the mind between the two characters. The addition of magic (no joke) makes the settings spectacular, too.

Jim & Doyle from At Swim, Two Boys
KJ says: The story of a romance between two boys living in Ireland in 1916, against the background of increasing political strife and the Easter Rebellion. The book is written in a stream-of-consciouness style, and interweaves a beautiful romance with grand tragedy.

Elizabeth Bennet & Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice
Abby says: You just can’t make this kind of list and leave off Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy.

Florentino & Fermina from Love in the Time of Cholera
Loranne says: This one is right up there with Elizabeth and Darcy for me. The story spans decades, and every time I read it, I feel like I’ve spent that much time with them. In a good way.

Eleanor & Park from Eleanor and Park
Kate says: Duh.

Florizel & Perdita from The Winter’s Tale
Matt says: Such a funny and lovely exchange:
P: O, these I lack,
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o’er and o’er!
F: What, like a corpse?
P: No, like a bank for love to lie and play on;
Not like a corpse; or if, not to be buried,
But quick and in mine arms.

Polyphemus & Galatea from Metamorphoses
Tim says: Funny and poignant, and, since it’s Ovid, cleverer than you think.

Gen & Irene from The Queen’s Thief Series
KJ says: The romance in this series triumphs over a lot of politics and personal history which would have otherwise meant they shouldn’t be together. Also, the two of them banter sarcastically for most of the series with moments of simple companionship amid the political chaos around them.

Cecilia & Robbie from Atonement
Abby says: Oh, I weep.

Venus & Adonis from all over the place (but especially this one)
Matt says: In its many variations, particularly Shakespeare’s, and some lesser known Italian poets.

Laurie & Jo from Little Women
Kate says: THAT’S RIGHT. I SAID IT.


Honorable Mentions

Including, but not limited to, Holden Caulfield’s infatuation with himself.


1. For the uninitiated: Treat Yo’ Self from Parks & Recreation

Labels: holiday, lists, love, reading, recommendations

Tuesday, December 17th, 2013

Top Five Books of 2013

For the last two years running (2012 and 2011), LT staff members have each compiled a list of their top five reads for the year.

For 2013, we wanted everyone to get in on the fun, so we compiled a list that all of LibraryThing can add to. We’d like to see not just the most read books of 2013, but the best of the best. What were your five favorite reads of 2013?

» List: Top Five Books of 2013 — Add your own.


Continuing this grand tradition, here’s the wordier breakdown of the staff’s favorites, including some honorable (and dishonorable) mentions:

Tim

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler Mike’s suggestion. Wonderful atmosphere.

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn Unexpected story of aliens landing in 14c. Germany, and of misunderstanding and understanding.

Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking by Philippe Coudray First book my son read cover-to-cover.

The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis I don’t believe I had read it before. Told it was a dud, but I loved it.

The Circle by Dave Eggers Not the greatest novel qua novel, but it’ll stick with me. And it was enormously validating to have some of my fears put out there.

Tim’s dishonorable mentions for 2013:
Wool by Hugh Howey: I love good science fiction, but most of it is crap. Hot or not, it’s crap…
The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle: Bad “classic” science fiction. Didn’t finish.
Children of God by Mary Doria Russell: I adored The Sparrow. The sequel is a big disappointment. It’s a “negative sequel.” Like the Matrix sequels, it makes the original worse.
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham: Bad “classic” science fiction.


Abby

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

Where’d You Go, Bernadette* by Maria Semple

*Abby would like it noted that she blames The Circle by Dave Eggers for making her put other books on hold, which might have actually been the best this year.


Kate

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar by Kelly Oxford

Kate’s dishonorable mentions for 2013:
There Was an Old Woman by Hallie Ephron
The Never List by Koethi Zan
Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason
You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt: A 1980s Cold War bildungsroman, complete with spies and mistaken identities?! I was supposed to love this book. I did not love this book.


Chris H.

Rough Passage to London: A Sea Captain’s Tale by Robin Lloyd

The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin

The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands by Nicholas Capp

Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman

The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures by Edward Ball


Mike

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch

The Crown Tower by Michael J. Sullivan

The Daylight War by Peter V. Brett

Low Town by Daniel Polansky


Seth

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

The Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner


Chris C.

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python by Willi Richert

A Wizard, a True Star: Todd Rundgren in the Studio by Paul Myers

Machine Learning for Hackers by Drew Conway

Frank: The Voice by James Caplan

Make: Electronics: Learning Through Discovery by Charles Platt


KJ

The Rathbones by Janice Clark

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

Cypherpunks by Julian Assange

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

KJ’s honorable mentions for 2013:
The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Open City by Teju Cole


Loranne

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
This one’s a re-read for me (for sci-fi book club), but it’s also one of my all-time favorites, so it’s going on the list.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
Definitely my most anticipated book of the year, and it did not disappoint. Allie Brosh is a hilarious, insightful genius.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
This one didn’t change my reading life the way his first novel, The Gone-Away World did, but it’s also excellent.

Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood
I binged on the whole trilogy in about a month, but this was my favorite by far.

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I absolutely loved The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game, but didn’t think this one quite measured up. Still very good, though.

Loranne’s dishonorable mentions for 2013:
The Circle by Dave Eggers: I really enjoyed doing One LibraryThing, One Book, but when I finally finished this one, I wanted to throw it against a wall. I just did not like it. At all.
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany: Another selection for sci-fi book club. I just couldn’t get into this one. I didn’t even make it to the halfway point. Kept waiting for things to get interesting/start making sense, and they never did.


Matt

Tutte le poesie by Eugenio Montale

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol by Nikolai Gogol

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The Origin and Goal of History by Karl Jaspers

Matt’s honorable mentions for 2013:
Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli by Amelia Rosselli
The Professional Chef’s Book of Charcuterie by Tina G. Mueller
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

More?

Tell us about your favorites for 2013 on Talk, or add your own Top Five to our list!

Labels: holiday, lists, reading, recommendations, top five

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

If you like this author, how about?

Short version. A few weeks ago, we introduced an “author read-alikes” feature, in four different flavors, with an invitation to help us pick the best one. We got our answer, and have gone with the winner. But the voting worked so well, we’ve decided to integrate it into the new author recommendations. The recommendations—now called “If you like this author..”—all include a ratings option. Rate a recommendation high and it will rise. Rate it low and it will sink. This is fortunate, as our author recommendations—we admit—need work. They’re nowhere near as good as our work-to-work recommendations.

With luck, your input will help us improve them!

More details. The vote between flavors turned out very well for us. Option 2 was a new and extremely slow algorithm. We thought it would be the best, and it polled a respectable 3.43 stars. It certainly outpolled version 3 and 4, at 2.95 and 2.94 stars respectively. But it did slightly worse than option 1, which polled 3.52. Best of all, option 1 was a much easier, faster algorithm. This was unexpected, but welcome. Option one is so fast we’ve been able to apply recommendations to virtually all major authors in a single night—option 2 would have taken weeks or months!

3.52 stars still isn’t that great. But the success of the vote suggested we might do better if we subjected the recommendations themselves to a vote. So we’ve done that. Basically, anything above 3 stars will conspire to move the recommendation up. Anything below three will move it down. The higher or lower the stars, the greater the movement. The effect will differ between authors and recommendation, as all recommendations have a (hidden) score, not just a ranking.

Some examples: Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Doris Kearns Goodwin, J. K. Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell.

Come talk about it here.

Labels: recommendations

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

Recommendations for groups and authors! (but help needed)

I’ve added two new types of “recommendations”—”characteristic works” for member groups and “read-alikes” for author pages. We need your help improving the latter.

Groups recommendations. The group recommendations are on the new and developing “Group Zeitgeist” pages. Each group Zeitgeist includes two lists:

  • Most-held works. Shows the top books held by group members, with no weighting or adjustment–that is, Harry Potter often wins.
  • Characteristic works. Shows the top books, weighted the way recommendations are weighted–that is, it shows works held by group-members in unusual amounts.

“Characteristic works” works quite well. Librarians who LibraryThing lists Taylor’s Introduction to Cataloging and Classification, Library: An Unquiet History and even AACR2. Christianity‘s list starts with Lewis’ Mere Christianity, Cthulhu Mythos with The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia, Medieval Europe with The Civilization of the Middle Ages, etc.

Author read-alikes. The new “author read-alike” uses much the same algorithm, but the results are not always as good. For example, C. S. Lewis recommends George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton and Madeleine L’Engle–good–but also Laura Ingalls Wilder–read by some of the same people who read Narnia, but not otherwise similar.

To help us improve the algorithm, we’re showing four different versions of the algorithm, and asking members to rate them with stars. Knowing both what authors fail and which version of the algorithm is better will help us develop a better algorithm. Keep in mind that we make recommendations to be interesting and entertaining, so a certain amount of weirdness is acceptable if it also produces something inspired.

So far, only about 2,200 authors have been calculated. You can see a list of the authors here, with your authors shown in bold.

Labels: authors, recommendations

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

New tag-based recommendations algorithm

Short version. I’ve just finished up a new algorithm for calculating book recommendations based on tags. You can see them on the “Recommendations” sub-page for every work page, under a special “Tags” heading (for a limited time only!), as shown to the right. When a work doesn’t have a recommendation, it will make it. (Expect to wait 2-10 seconds.) Recommendations will be propagating through the system, and, combined with the four other recommendations algorithms we use, going into your personal recommendations over time.

Come discuss it on talk here.

Long version. Recommendation algorithms are always tricky, but doing it based on tags alone is particularly difficult. Do you consider total overlap? Overlaps by tag? How do you rate a book missing an important tag? How do you factor up meaty and meaningful tags, and downgrade meaningless, over obvious or ephemeral ones? LibraryThing has long had tag-based work-to-work recommendations, but they were of uneven quality. I haven’t been making new ones for a while now, and letting them die out of the system; all the old tag-based recommendations have been removed.

The new algorithm approaches the issue afresh, looking at all of a work’s tags, and taking into account various factors that can trip it up. It thinks about factors like tag salience on a work and generally, degree of agreement between tags and low-value tags. It also attends to similar levels of work popularity. After deciding on the basic algorithm, I toyed with various “knobs” for days, myself and with Jeremy, trying to get the best results for a set of sample and problem works. In my experience, you can’t do an algorithm like this without a sense of appropriateness, taste and proportion, and (I hope) that this is one reason LibraryThing recommendations are generally so good.

Once a tag-recommendation is generated, it takes a while for it to be incorporated into the “Combo recommendations” above. “Combo recommendations” incorporate tag recommendations to greater or lesser degrees, depending on its assessment of their quality and contribution. Your personal recommendations are based mostly on these “Combo recommendations.”

The tag recommendations are going to take a while to build for all works that need them. After that, we plan to do some sort of “Pepsi Challenge” test. We think LibraryThing recommendations are as good as any out there, and are eager to prove it.

Some examples. Tag recommendations work absolutely best on non-fiction titles about something very simple and clear cut:

Works really “about” two or more things are harder, as are books with a specific point of view, which might seem separate to some extent from the tags on it. Some examples:

  • PHP and MySQL for dummies by Janet Valade — A successful example, where most of the books deal with both PHP and MySQL, with an orientation toward “entry level” programmers (eg., the “Visual Quickstart” books)
  • Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic by David B. Currie — A successful example that mostly recommends other Protestant-to-Catholic conversion stories (rather than Catholic-to-Protestant ones)
  • Goldwater by Barry Goldwater — A mixed but mostly decent result, surfacing some Goldwater-specific material, but also showing other biographies, especially from the period and involving senators. Ideally it wouldn’t have quite so many contender-bios, as I’m not sure the potential Goldwater reader is eager to dig into Edward’s bio.
  • Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner — Decent list, starting with a short-shelf of popular economics-in-life books, followed by popular introductions to economics and economics-oriented thinky-think books

Fiction, especially non-“genre” fiction, is the big problem. Literary fiction isn’t “about” what it’s about in quite the same way that non-fiction is. Creating some separation between adult and youth titles is also hard. But we’ve made significant progress.

  • Watership Down by Richard Adams — A decent list of animal-centered chapter books, with classics like Redwall and The Wind in the Willows and no The Runaway Bunny or Knuffle Bunny.
  • The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander — A decent list of magical fantasy books, angled to youth and toward Welsh mythology.
  • The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien — A good list, but obviously centered quite strongly on Tolkien. Works with significant secondary literatures (cf., Harry Potter, Narnia, etc.) tend to be dominated by guides, atlases and so forth.
  • Little Women by Louisa May Alcott — Starts out well, putting March second, but then goes off the rails somewhat after a dozen. The Mother-Daughter Book Club wins because it apparently takes place in Concord, Massachusetts and involves mothers and daughters. The Secret Life of Bees is also about mothers and daughters, coming of age, sisterhood, and was made into a movie. Meh.
  • The Book Thief by Markus Zusak — Decent list, with other books, mostly fiction, about children during the Holocaust.
  • The Shack by William P. Young — I haven’t read it, but I think have a sense of it. There are some winners here, like The Christmas List, Redeeming Love. The Year of Fog and The Deep End of The Ocean cover some of the same issues from a non-religious standpoint, and Where Is God When It Hurts covers them from a non-fiction, evangelical perspective, which might or might not be wanted. But C. S. Lewis and Paul Bunyan(!) aren’t winners, being rather different sorts of fictions. Tim LaHaye is winning almost solely on being “christian fiction,” and James Redfield for “religious fiction,” “inspirational,” etc.
  • Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry — Zombies? We got zombies, focusing on plague-based zombie terror (no Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Straight-up plauge titles, like The White Plague are also included. Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer probably shouldn’t be there, but it’s a great book.
  • Earth Abides by George R. Stewart — More apocalypse, this time with few zombies. The Brief History of the Dead is rather different, though I’m not sure how LibraryThing could know that. At least it doesn’t attempt to recommend other boring books, like Earth Abides.
  • Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman — Some good stuff. Sound lousy. The tags are dragging the recommendations all around—children, picture book, Gaiman, mothers and daughters, charles vess. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star is winning on “poetry,” “rhymes” and child-associated tags.
  • Love in the asylum : a novel by Lisa Carey — My wife’s book. A decent-list of insane-asylum fiction, with some memoirs.
  • Twilight by Stephenie Meyer — Largely okay, so far as I can tell, although with less secondary literature than I would have guessed.
  • Illyria by Elizabeth Hand is winning on tags like “forbidden love,” “teen romance,” “teen lit,” “romantic” and “contemporary fantasy.” I have no idea if the books are similar.

Come discuss it on talk here.

Labels: recommendations, tagging, tags

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

New recommendations: What should you borrow?

Member sturlington recently proposed the following:

“You know what would be a neat feature? If I could get a list of books from a friend’s library that are recommended for me based on my library. For borrowing/mooching purposes. For instance, my husband is putting in his books right now, and it would be cool to quickly get a list of his books that I might enjoy.”

I thought this an excellent idea, and easy to implement, so I did it. It’s a great way to scout out your friends’ libraries.

If you’re signed in, you can see the feature on every other (public) member’s profile page. Or you can check out what books I should borrow from Jeremy (a lot), and vice versa (a few).


Come talk about it on Talk.

Labels: recommendations

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Recommended for you

Borrowing a feature from Netflix, I’ve introduced a “Recommended for you” section on work page. It appears whenever a book appears on the “LibraryThing Recommendations” list of any of your books.

As with other such lists, it uses the standard collection colors. It only lists books which you have marked to “include in recommendations.”

Come talk about it here.

Labels: recommendations

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Beta: “Read Alike” recommendations

I’ve pushed through a beta version of a new recommendation engine.

The “Read Alikes” recommendations supplement our existing automatic and member recommendations. “Read Alikes” are based directly on the members who have your books—the people who “read alike” you, or whatever.

So far, opinion is divided. Some members love it, and are getting great recommendations. Others report a parade of things they already know about. Is it quite consciously, however, a beta feature. It may be improved, or it may go away. Most likely, it will go away and be replaced by a better overall algorithm, with better tools for managing your recommendations.

Labels: new features, recommendations

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Recommending books—and series

It’s frequent for recommendations to include multiple books from the same series. So I’ve changed how recommendations display, to show these and get out of the way for other recommendations.

I also added recommendations to all Common Knowledge pages, so you can see aggregate recommendations for every series, award, place, character and so forth. For series, the results can be very good. Others can be strange, but are often quite cool.

This is another example of our continual effort to “unlearn” ecommerce, especially Amazon, conventions. Real people recommend series to each other—not to mention authors, genres, etc. Stores recommend discrete objects, because that’s what they sell. LibraryThing, which strives be interesting and useful, not to sell things, can transcend these store limitations. We just need to realize they’re there.

Come talk about it here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/79301

Labels: now with series, recommendations

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Will you like it?

I added something I’ve been working off-and-on for about a year*: “Will you like it?” Here’s an example, correctly predicting that I will like Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave:

You’ll find the section on work pages.

Because it requires a lot of processing, you have to click to get the result. Here it is, correctly predicting that I would not enjoy a popular book about Knitting:

Each assessment has a “certainty” score (eg., “high,” “low,” etc.) based largely on how popular the book is. You can see the raw scores by hovering over the downward arrow.

How good is it? Meh. It’sokay.

This is a devilishly hard algorithm to get right. I have some ideas for improvement, but it’s fundamentally a lark and a conversation piece at present, so I don’t want to waste too much time on it.

How it works. In case you’re interested, it works completely apart from our book-to-book recommendation system, or the system that aggregates those recommendations into member-specific lists of 1,000 recommended books. Instead, “Will you like it?” works directly from the data, examining the users who have a book and how their books relate to yours.

As such, it isn’t very good at sussing out where your tastes differ from those of people who share your books. For example, my large collection of books on Greek history match me up with people who enjoy other ancient history, but I am not that interested in early Republican Rome, no matter what the algorithm thinks.

What’s interesting? I’m not going to claim it’s perfect, but it’s interesting that, to my knowledge, nobody’s every tried this before.

I think this is yet another case of Amazon limiting the horizons of what people imagine online, particularly in the online book world. Amazon pioneered book-to-book and user-to-book reviews. The work was groundbreaking but it was also routed in commercial success. User-to-book recommendations drive customers to books they’ll like and book-to-book recommendations help them find the perfect book, as well as increase the number of items in each order. Giving people honest assessments of whether they’ll like a book is murkier. Does Amazon want to tell a customer they won’t enjoy something? And what if they’re wrong?

Meanwhile, LibraryThing succeeds by being fun and interesting, not by selling books. It gives us a rare freedom to invent features that don’t sell books, like our Unsuggester—what books will you hate?—and now this.

I started a topic to discuss it.


*Don’t worry. This didn’t distract. I just pushed two combination/separation bug fixes, and Chris and I are hard at work on the catalog, in preparation for some larger changes (ETA: one week?).

Labels: amazon, new features, recommendations

Monday, May 26th, 2008

LibraryThing recommendations!



LibraryThing Recommendations—called “the best feature on the site” by one user—are back and much better than before.

You can find recommendations at the top of your profile page. Or check out mine.

The new recommendations include:

  • A large number of primary recommendations for ever member—usually 1,000—based on a single comprehensive algorithm.
  • Individual recommendation lists for each member’s tags.
  • Filtering of recommendations by popular LibraryThing tags.
  • Individual lists of other members’ recommendations (member recommendations were added two weeks ago)
  • Up to 500 so-bad-they’re-good recommendations, building off the LibraryThing Unsuggester, and called “Your Unsuggester.”* We hope “What I shouldn’t read” has some meme legs.
  • A “why” feature for each recommendation, laying out what the recommendation was based on.
  • A pony.**

I let the recommendations themselves out early—see the original talk post, with over 140 messages!—and members had mostly positive reactions. Those who don’t like them can perhaps be molified by the greater number and ways to filter and angle the recommendations.

Recommendations now change daily—faster if you are below 200 books and keep adding them. The system keeps track of all recommendations and when you received them. In the near future I plan to provide personalized recommendation emails based on new recommendations.

I’ve created a new Talk thread to discuss the changes, and suggest changes. My thanks to those who participated in the initial thread, influencing development in a number of important ways.


*If Thomas Jefferson is in Hell, I am confident the Devil is torturing him with books from Jefferson’s Unsuggester List—heavy on the chick- and tween-lit!
*With apologies to Last.fm.

Labels: new feature, new features, recommendations

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Member book recommendations

I’ve just added a small new feature, Member recommendations. You can check it out under “Recommendations” here or here.*

Basically, you can now add your own recommendations to LibraryThing’s six (!) algorithmic recommendations. If you want, you can also leave a short explanation of your choice.

I’m throwing this one out pretty raw.** It’s available from the primary page of a work, and from its recommendation page, and on a single Member Recommendations page.

To be done:

  • A way to see all the recommendations you’ve given
  • A way to see all the recommendations others have applied to your books
  • Recommendation flagging
  • Up/down voting on recommendations?

Come talk about the feature and where it could go on Talk here.


*I hope to link to some better examples soon, one members start adding them. I find fiction recommendations very hard, so most of my recommendations so far have been off ancient history, which makes the feature seem much less interesting than it is!
**I’ve had this on ice for a while, while dealing with tags and scaling issues. I don’t think I’m going to be making major changes until Chris comes back from paternity leave later this week or next.

Labels: new feature, new features, recommendations

Monday, March 5th, 2007

LibraryThing recommendations on Abebooks

Today Abebooks.com unwraps a new feature–LibraryThing’s book recommendations. Selected books sport up to six recommendations, which link to books offered by Abe’s 13,500 independent booksellers.

It’s a relief to see our recommendations finally escape! We’ve known for a long time that they were good and getting better every day. Personal collections and personal tags are an amazingly rich source of recommendations. Abe was an ideal venue. LibraryThing people and Abe people are hard-core book-lovers, and LibraryThing’s focus on collections acquired over time matches with Abe’s unmatched strength in the long tail of out-of-print books.

You can see LibraryThing recommendations on books like:

SOURCE AND COVERAGE. The data comes from the “combined” recommendations visible on work pages. These are drawn from LibraryThing five distinct recommendation algorithms, including our “people who have X also have Y” algorithm, our tag algorithm and the mysterious “special sauce” algorithm.*

As of today, LibraryThing recommendations appear on about 10% of Abe titles. That’s just to start. We’ll be scaling up the coverage dramatically in the weeks and months to come. We’ll also iron out a few kinks, and take advantage of the 25% growth in LibraryThing since the last time we generated the combined recommendations. So far it’s US and UK-only, but Abe’s non-English sites are a logical next step.

CONCERNS. Now is a good time to repeat and reaffirm what I said back in May when Abebooks bought a minority stake in LibraryThing:

“There is no down side. LibraryThing’s stringent Privacy Policy remains intact and in effect. The contract forbids LibraryThing from giving Abe ANY user data—not one user name, real name or email. Reviews will not leave the site without explicit permission (ie., not some buried legal clause). LibraryThing will not suddenly sprout Abe ads all over the place or prevent you from buying from other booksellers. Rather, LibraryThing will provide Abe with certain anonymous and aggregate data, like book recommendations or tag clouds, to help Abe users find books they want.”

None of this has changed, nor will it. We’ll see about tag clouds on Abe? (Can I hear an amen?)

MEANING. Today’s announcement doesn’t change anything on the LibraryThing site. But it means something even so. On a practical level, it’s good news for our growth–another step along the road to world domination.** More interestingly, it puts the collective intelligence of readers at the center of the Abe experience in an utterly new way. And it advances “Social Cataloging,” “Social Networking,” “Web 2.0,” “crowd-sourcing,” “the long tail,” “folksonomy” and other trendy—and not totally bogus—buzzwords.

Now that Abe is out of the door, Abby, John and I are going to be turning our attention to getting LibraryThing data into libraries—recommendations, tags, tagging services, and whatever else they’ll take—and for a fraction of what they’re paying now for services like NovelList.***

Me? I’m going to Legoland! That’s right, I’m sitting in the Copenhagen airport right now, waiting for a flight to Århus, where I’m talking to Danish Librarians about LibraryThing and library catalogs. The organizers of Mit Bibliotek (My Library) saw my blog post Is your OPAC fun? (a manifesto of sorts) and wanted me to turn it into a talk. For a chance to visit Denmark, I’d turn it into a juggling routine!

*Apparently the phrase “special sauce” causes our non-English site translators no end of grief.
**World domination through work combination!
**Anyone want to help me find a URL for NovelList that isn’t a password-protected link to the service? It’s seems—dare I say it—ungoogleable.

UPDATE: The Abebooks blog covered it, stressing that Abebooks has always been about finding the exact book you’re looking for. Visitors arrive with a book in mind, not to browse. Search is still their strength, but BookHints adds some browsing to the site.

Labels: abe, abebooks, recommendations