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Weirdly, I keep getting books I like in the search. It would be nice if I could add more than three authors because my reading is already extremely diverse, lik
by fao_ 6y ago
Weirdly, I keep getting books I like in the search. It would be nice if I could add more than three authors because my reading is already extremely diverse, like music listening there is very little that I dislike (According to spotify, I listened to over 500 genres of music this year -- although I'm not really sure how useful that is because of how every piece of music seems to be categorized into it's own genre).
For example, I put in:
Mort - Terry Pratchett
Mortal Engines - Stanisław Lem
My Lesbian Experience With
Loneliness - Kabi Nagata
And Judith Butler was in the search results. So instead I realised that Mort and Mortal Engines are adjacent, genre-wise and tried:
Mort - Terry Pratchett
My Lesbian Experience With
Loneliness - Kabi Nagata
Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
and in the search results I got:
The Far Side comics
"This Book Is Full of Spiders"
Douglas Adams
Kurt Vonnegut
Brian Lee O'Mally
Calvin and Hobbes
All of these works I have enjoyed quite a lot -- I used to be able to quote the radio show of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy from memory, I own all of the John Dies at the End series, and I'm wondering about getting the special edition of Calvin and Hobbes because there's quite a lot I haven't seen and it's pretty timeless.
The rest, mostly consisting of PG Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde, are works that I consider myself interested in yet unexposed to, but they are hardly opposites of the books I put in?
So I'm not really convinced of the utility of this tool as it stands.
Perhaps it is tailored to a single type of reader that only reads books within their purview (Perhaps, political history books, or purely science fiction books) to the exclusion of many other interesting and worthwhile genres?
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Edit : What is especially interesting about this is that when I enter only
My Lesbian Experience With
Loneliness - Kabi Nagata
Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
I get a book by Sappho(!) and a literal deluge of mostly-feminist literature with only a handful of anti-feminist works -- with the touchpoint that those anti-feminist works are trying to sound and look feminist!
I'm not sure how Sappho is directly in opposition to Nagata's work, and it strikes me that anyone who has read both Nagata and Butler would also be familiar with the works of Sappho?
- Freak_NL 6y agoThis tool seems a bit nonsensical for anything that isn't as blatantly politically one-sided and polarized as Ayn Rand. Just a random couple of highly appreciated titles from my collection: Hyperion, Gormenghast, Lolita (Sci-fi, British gothic fantasy, 20th century American literature) And it suggests The Farside (well yeah, if you want something completely on the opposite side of well-written prose), Tintin, and Shakespeare (huh?). As for breaking any bubble I might live in: I grew up reading Tintin. Interestingly enough it throws up Preacher as well, a comic written by Garth Ennis. Again not really breaking any bubble there: I love his works and have read Preacher, The Boys, Battlefields, and all his Punisher stories (that man is the only comic writer who truly groks Frank Castle).