Taking life philosophically.
24 January 2010
Finding new books to read is in one sense easy and in another sense difficult. On one hand we have access to a great deal of literature. It is not necessary to go to a library or a bookstore anymore. Project Gutenberg already has a vast selection of books in various languages, and they are always improving the usability of the e-books they offer. And if you prefer to listen instead of reading, LibriVox is your friend: they offer free audio books read by volunteers, and they too have books in many languages.
On the other hand, even though books are easily available, sometimes it is difficult to choose among everything there is on offer. Collaborative filtering systems aim to solve the problem by recommending new things by comparing your past preferences to the preferences of other people. For example, if I like books A and B and you like books A, B and C, chances are that I will like book C as well. Many sites now use algorithms based on this idea.
For me, the results have been a bit mixed. I cannot say to have benefited much from using these services. I think the idea is good but for some reason or another, in general the services that are out there do not seem to be very useful yet. However, LibraryThing adds a few twists to the basic formula. They even have a feature they call UnSuggester. It does the opposite: instead of recommending books you that you will probably like, it finds for you books you are not likely to enjoy. For example, for someone who likes Spinoza’s Ethics, it (un-)suggests sci-fi books and a Dan Brown novel.
More useful than the UnSuggester are LibraryThing’s “member recommendations”. They are a form of “active” collaborative filtering, which means that they are not automatically generated but human-made: people have liked two books and noticed a similarity between them. I recently found Ingvar Ambjørnsen’s Brødre i blodet (literally Blood Brothers, but apparently English translations use other titles) (1996) this way. The recommendation was based on my positive rating of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980).
Ambjørnsen’s novel is a story of two men, Elling and Kjell Bjarne, and their problems. They are patients in a rehabilitation program. I was expecting the story to be outrageous, but instead of the absurdity of Toole’s novel, here I found warm humor. The focalizer throughout the novel is Elling, and his preoccupations and insecurities are the principal subject matter of the work. He is a rational and articulate person with great phobias that he is trying to overcome.
I read the Finnish translation (Veriveljet, 2004) of the novel. Although I have not consulted the original version, I found myself wondering about certain choices the translator made. Yet the novel itself is wonderful, funny but deep, and I do not think I would have found it without LibraryThing.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.