Fun!

It's been a month since the last update to this blog, so I'm going to step in to provide life support. And nothing — and I mean nothing — breathes life into the lifeless like a pop quiz! Are you ready?

Q: Who likes fun?

A: Everyone likes fun!

Fun is: UnSuggester, a service provided by LibraryThing that allows you to find out the opposite of your favorite books! How it works, in three steps:

1. You enter the title of a book (or search for one by author).

2. LibraryThing determines who has that book, and who doesn't. Based on the statistical likelihood of a personal library containing particular books, it determines which titles should be in any given library, but are also not held within libraries that include the book you've entered. (This sounds complicated, but it ain't. The program does it for you — that, my friends, is the magic of algorithms!)

3. You are presented with a ranked list of opposites to the book you've entered.

So what do we learn? Whatever it is, we must bear in mind that the results have nothing to do with the content of the books, but rather with who owns or doesn't own them. Were we to take this as a serious inquiry, it would be of the reading habits of the nation — and it isn't even reliable for that, as the scope of the data is bounded by self-selection, which introduces a significant bias.

Nonetheless, it's fun we're after, not research! So take a gander at this list of examples, provided by yours truly:

— The opposite of The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus is Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

— The opposite of The Cantos of Ezra Pound is The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

— The opposite of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault is what appears to be a sequel to Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants

— The opposite of A Humument by Tom Phillips is Deception Point by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida is Deception Point by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus is The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

— The opposite of The Marx-Engels Reader is Cell: A Novel by Stephen King

— The opposite of Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont is Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff is The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

— The opposite of The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes is Deception Point by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci is Deception Point by Dan Brown

— The opposite of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein is The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

— The opposite of A Void by Georges Perec is The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

We can reverse this, looking up the opposites of the opposites of my books to find possible recommendations:

— The opposite of The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom is The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault

— The opposite of Cell: A Novel by Stephen King is Illuminations by Walter Benjamin

— The opposite of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown is Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze

Now you know, and knowing is... well, you know.