What are your favourite final sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its last sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the last line?

Final sentences are much, much harder for me to remember. As soon as I read last [...]

Today’s question: Cataloging sources. What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT’s almost 700 sources?

Most of my books have been added from the Library of Congress; Amazon comes in [...]

This is my first Sunday Salon post, to say that I haven’t done any reading today!

My weekends usually follow a routine. From Friday afternoon to Sunday morning, I spend time with my consumption partner (to borrow a euphemism from the lovely Kerry Howley), because I don’t have much time to do that during [...]

Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation has posted recently about his planned “Summer of Roth,” and on Wednesday explained himself further.

It started back when Wyatt Mason, writing at his superb new blog Sentences, mused about how much of his backlist reviewers coming to Roth’s new novel Indignation should know. As he told it, [...]

What are your favourite first sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its first sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the first line?

I’m afraid I am a little boring when it comes to this question. “Call me Ishmael,” [...]

This afternoon’s reading spot:

My version of beach reading: listen to the surf and read about the real sea, ignoring the depressing lack of salt air off Lake Michigan. But still, it’s pretty damn nice.

Back in June, thekoolaidmom discovered LibraryThing‘s UnSuggester and posted about its rampant anti-recommendation of many Christian books.

In defense of the UnSuggester, I think it first helps to understand how it works, which can be a little bit confusing. It’s all based on co-ownership probabilities, similar to the suggester, but somehow the converse has more of a tendency to trip people up. I think a lot of the heat can be taken off the UnSuggester if you look at its own page rather than the whole-library unsuggestions, which do seem a bit flawed (I sometimes find books in them I own, because of combination and caching issues). Also, the UnSuggester itself gives a lot more explanation as to why something shows up.

thekoolaidmom mentions that selections from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list cause some of the Christian-related unsuggestions, implying some kind of conflict between thought-provoking lit and religious books. So as a test case I chose The Alchemist, which in fact I have never read (and is not on the list itself) but seems to be a good example of the type of book in question. There are 8,102 copies of The Alchemist in LT, for reference.

The first unsuggestion for The Alchemist is Exegetical Fallacies by D.A. Carson. Based on how popular Exegetical Fallacies is across LT, in a random sample of 8,102 LT libraries you would expect to find 26 copies of this book. However, in the 8,102 libraries with The Alchemist, you actually find zero copies of Exegetical Fallacies.

The second unsuggestion is The Cross of Christ by John R.W. Stott. In this case, you would expect 22.9 copies of the book in a random sample of 8,102 libraries, but again, zero members who own The Alchemist own The Cross of Christ.

So it seems pretty clear that these should be unsuggestions. The real question is not why the UnSuggester so often returns Christian books based on lit fic inputs, but why so few libraries seem to co-own both types of book. My theory is that a contributing factor, at least, is that there are many either church libraries or otherwise all-religious-book libraries on LT. For example, one of the largest libraries on LT is around 15,000 volumes of straight-up Christian nonfiction. And based on discussion in Talk as well as the early development of the organizational accounts, I think there are probably a significant number of small church libraries that use LT in lieu of an OPAC or more expensive system. I think a minor piece of evidence in favor of this theory is that it seems most of the UnSuggested Christian books are nonfiction. It’s not clear that Christian fiction is separated so strongly and it seems church libraries would be more likely to have the nonfiction theological stuff.

Continue reading In Defense of the UnSuggester