Recently, I blogged about the differences between browsing for book selections in bricks and mortar stores versus online. There's another difference I've noticed about selecting books digitally versus in stores and that is the way physical world recommendations work as compared with digital recommendations. On Amazon, for example, books are recommended in three ways: (a) the "my recommendations" section of my account; (b) when I look up a title, Amazon also tells me about other books viewed/purchased by people who liked this title; and, (c) the customer reviews section, including the average number of "stars" each book has received from readers.
It's the stars I'm interested in at the moment. I've noticed that often a book that is recommended to me by a friend, or that gets good reviews in the press actually doesn't get a lot of stars online or vice versa. This may be a case of TMI, but my own wetware algorithms struggle with how to internally weigh real world reviews against Amazon's star system. I do take into account how many online reviews there were: for example, a title with five stars may only have 6 reviewers if it's a new work or a work self-published by someone on Kindle. So my wetware algorithm may discount a high number of stars if there's a low number of reviewers. Also, I'll read through some of the actual customer reviews online, but this gets unwieldy where there are a lot of reviews, unless everyone seems to be saying pretty much the same thing about the book.
In a world of so many books to read and not enough time (can you see I'm still suffering from writer's block myself???), I need a better internal algorithm!
And in the vein of discussing my own summer reading projects, I would recommend The Memory Keeper's Daughter, although it's perhaps more drawn out than it needs to be, and I'm not sure about The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I haven't been able to get through it. Can anyone advise as to whether it's worth persevering?
It's definitely worth persevering with The Elegance of the Hedgehog. As I recall, the first few chapters were pretty heavy with more time on philosophy than plot but that balance shifts quickly enough and the last 2/3 of the book were excellent. I had the same thought but was glad I stuck with it.
Posted by: CSH | June 23, 2011 at 10:25 AM
I get some books in by listening to them on my nano (downloaded from itunes) while I do things that otherwise wouldnt allow reading - driving, lawn mowing, exercising, etc. It saves your on your eye strain also.
Posted by: Jeff Yates | June 23, 2011 at 06:27 PM
You're preaching to the converted, Jeff. I've been listening to audio CDs in the car for a while but finally invested in an iPod nano (with car kit) and started downloading from iTunes. It's a great idea.
Posted by: Jacqui Lipton | June 23, 2011 at 06:31 PM
Jacqui - please feel free to send me suggestions for audio books - I have a very long car trip in front of me and need book suggestions :-)
Posted by: Jeff Yates | June 23, 2011 at 09:45 PM
Well, this only goes to show how deranged I am, but I really enjoyed "Fluke" by Christopher Moore. It's extremely silly but the dialogue is very funny. And my favorite is still "Supreme Courtship" by Christopher Buckley. The audio version of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" is very cute. Pretty much anything by Carl Hiaasen is amusing. I recently finished "Star Island" which I enjoyed and apparently the audio version of "Skinny Dip" (which I read on the Kindle) is very good. If you haven't read The Millennium Trilogy or The Hunger Games trilogy, I would recommend them both. Oh, and the audio version of "World War Z" is wonderful - it's more like a radio play with a large cast of actors.
Posted by: Jacqui Lipton | June 24, 2011 at 11:01 AM
Jacqui - thanks much - my taste are more toward non-fiction, but these are very good. :-) (My listening is usually morning for long stretches while driving and much fiction tends to make me sleepy ...)
Posted by: Jeff Yates | June 24, 2011 at 11:24 AM
Ah, so for non-fiction, I would recommend "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot, "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin, "Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee" by Chloe Hooper, "Framing Innocence" by Lynn Powell, and "Whitewashed" by John Tehranian. I've also enjoyed the first two Teddy Roosevelt biographies by Edmund Morris.
Posted by: Jacqui Lipton | June 24, 2011 at 11:37 AM
These sound good - I also like comedy books and thought that Sarah Silverman's book was good as well as Samantha Bee's book - also, audio books by Olivia Munn, Nora Ephron, Steve Martin, David Sedaris & Patton Oswalt. Re TDR I recently bought "The Big Scrum" about how TDR helped save early football (not on audio though).
Posted by: Jeff Yates | June 24, 2011 at 12:21 PM