I obviously have an odd taste in books.

The Library Thing Unsuggester has been getting a few comments recently: I found Neil Gaiman’s comments on it really interesting, particularly the part about how if you like his books, the Unsuggester reckons you are unlikely to like Christian books.

So, I decided to try it, looking up a few of my favourite books, firstly with one my favourite fictional novels, Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. Ok, I only own about 10 books from the list of 72 books it suggested I wouldn’t like if I owned or had read Cryptonomicon, but there were many books there that are the kind of books I would like to read. Interestingly, almost all of the books in the list were Christian books, number one on the list being “When I Don’t Desire God : how to fight for joy” by John Piper. I haven’t read that particular one, but I have read Desiring God and several other books by Piper, and they’re great. On the other hand, I do believe that I wouldn’t be particularly interested in “This lullaby : a novel” by Sarah Dessen or “Girls in pants : the third summer of the Sisterhood” by Ann Brashares.

My experience of looking up a favourite fictional novel ended in results much like Neil Gaiman’s – i.e. recommendations against Christian books – so I decided to look up a Christian book and see what I found. I picked one of my favourite Christian books of all time, A Call to Spiritual Reformation, by Don Carson. The subsequent list returned of the top 75 books that I wouldn’t like included 22 books I have read, 14 more that I would like to read, and many more that I have no particular objection to, some of which are books that Tegan has read (e.g. Memoirs of a Geisha, or the Joy Luck Club). Also in the list are several of my favourite books – Cryptonomicon, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Catcher in the Rye, Neuromancer, etc. And then there are others I tend to agree with, e.g. I was never planning to read “The time traveller’s wife” by Audrey Niffenegger, which came it on number 3 on this Unsuggestion list.

Some analysis: the list of Unsuggestions focused on books that were the most represented in collections on LibraryThing. For example, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is the most owned books on LibraryThing (at the moment, 5,474 users have it listed in their collections), which was the highest ranked Harry Potter book on my “Call to Spiritual Reformation” Unsuggestion list at number 11. Also, the suggestion system becomes skewed when there are multiple versions of a single work out there; a book needs to be owned by 75 people before it can be used for an Unsuggestion. Unfortunately, there seem to be hundreds of versions of the Bible around, and only one has more than 75 owners. The Holy Bible Unsuggestion list fits with the results I noticed above, but I can’t put any reliability on it because the huge variety of version; different versions of the ESV, NIV or King James Bibles have less than 75 owners each so who knows – it might be that if you own a ESV Classic Reference Bible, Hardcover, Black Letter Text you might also own books by popular modern authors (like Neil Gaiman), but not if you own a NIV Life Application Study Bible. It’s a bit hard to tell when there are so few owners of each different version on LibraryThing.

Overall, my main conclusion is that people who won Christian books own other Christian books and are less likely than the whole population of LibraryThing users to own normal popular novels; but it’s probably really the other way round, that most people who own popular novels are unlikely to own Christian books, and that it’s the sheer volume of people who like Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson who are not Christians that skew the results. Still, it was an interesting exercise, even if completely irrelevant to me.