Hee. I am unlikely to read books about Christianity, fantasy sci-fi, and anything by Michael Crichton or Stephen King, apparently.
John Grisham seems to be the anti-Wittgenstein. I can see that.
If you're holding a copy of Motley Crue's autobiography ("The Dirt"), you're recommended to steer away from "A Tale of Two Cities", "Atlas Shrugged", "The seven habits of highly effective people", Dan Brown and Toni Morrison, all just in the top ten.
Apparently people who appreciate classic investment advice are unlikely to enjoy Anne Rice, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, or Jeanette Winterson.
Teo, the advice of the later Wittgenstein is even more useful.
There's got to be some ultimately evil book out that that will generate the ideal library. Not 'The Bridges of Madison County', but like that.
Actually, 'The Bridges of Madison County' isn't bad. Theology, philosophy (including Being and Time), a bunch of fantasy novels, some of which I've read, and a book on crocheting.
That is pretty funny. Each of the anti-suggestion groupings tend to have a strong theme.
6- 8 does work pretty well. Coulter's books also generate decent unsuggestions.
Mieville yields unsuggestions about Christianity, which I could see.
Lawrence Wright's history of Al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, yields a shitload of SF, particularly Terry Pratchett, which seems very wrong.
Terry Pratchett's word processor kills fascists, or so the results of Mein Kampf would (un)suggest.
Speaking of diverting search-type things, have y'all seen Miss Dewey?
6- I may have found it: "Knitting on the road : sock patterns for the traveling knitter by Nancy Bush.
12.--Except that Moe Lane, once of Obsidian Wings, now riding herd at RedState, is a big Terry Pratchett fan.
14
First rule of good anti-suggestions No Chuck Palahniuk.
now riding herd at RedState
What would you say that RedState is a herd of? And the same question for Unfogged?
By the way, I just discovered that the Mineshaft is right here in Durham.
RedState is a herd of water buffalo---ponderous but vicious.
Unfogged is a herd of those spry little jumpy things halfway between deer and rabbits. You know, those things.
I'm pretty sure she means springbok, actually.
A little Dean Koontz gets you a pretty severe list.
The flaw in all this seems to be the many users whose libraries aparently consist almost exclusively of either 1. Evangelical Xtian tracts, 2. Genre SF/Graphic novels or 3. Other genre fiction.
Unfogged as a herd of jumbuks? Jolly swagmen? Coolibah trees?
Huh, I guess a jumbuck is just a sheep. All this time I thought it was some kind of antelope type thingy.
I don't think Australia has antelope.
Isn't it just about possible that
1. LibraryThing is overpopulated with early adopters and book geeks, which means that it's chock full of computer experts and academics;
2. computer experts are likely to use it to catalog their books, period, while academics are likely to use it to catalog their office books;
3. Therefore you might just, stereotypes obtaining, find that entering any academic-type book, produces a whole lot of fantasy/sci fi by way of antithesis?
Sorry, my attention wandered for a second there. No, what I meant were dik-diks.
28 gets it exactly right. Every time I enter a philosophy book, it tells me (essentially) that I own no pop-fiction. As a matter of fact, I do own pop-fiction.
I am not a stamp collector, and frankly never understood the appeal.
Sophie Kinsella, The sisterhood of the traveling pants, Terry Pratchett, and Bible commentaries are all alien to me. No really interesting antitheses.
The most interesting is when you put in a very popular book you sorta like. The antithesis of "Great Expectations" is a lot of po-tech stuff by Howard Rheingold et al, PLUS a lot of Christian shit.
Apparently "Crime and Punishment" is an especially non-female-type book.
Technically, it was my fault. But if you want to blame w/d, go right ahead.
The Devil Wears Prada is the opposite of the Bible, followed by The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
There are people who don't own bibles?
There are people who wouldn't think to enter them into LibraryThing. (Does your Bible have a barcode?)
Printed with the sign of Mammon!? I should think not!
So, does LibraryThing work with an optical reader, then?
IIRC, when I looked at it like, last year (early adopter? me?) you could enter your library using a digital camera like the iSight into a program like Delicious Monster, then upload it to LibraryThing.
I just looked at the Beta version, and apparently you can just type in author, title, or ISBN to get a popup list of possible books. What you're talking about sounds rather more ... involved.
I've found ISBN is the easiest and quickest way to add books.
Depends. Do you want to get carpal tunnel typing ISBNs, or do you want the digital camera to get carpal tunnel instead?
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants comes up a lot. It's opposites are:
# The elementary particles by Michel Houellebecq
# Excession by Iain Banks
# Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software
# Code complete : a practical handbook of software construction by Steve McConnell (
# Finnegans wake by James Joyce
# Crash by J. G. Ballard (
# Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks
# In the beginning ...was the command line by Neal Stephenson
# The flowers of evil; by Charles Baudelaire
# The dragons of Eden : speculations on the evolution of human intelligence by Carl Sagan
I think that working back from pop books is more fun.
45: This probably depends on how many books you have.
Wittgenstein, Jane Jacobs, John Calvin, and Walter Benjamin, plus some Christian books, some fantasy books, and some programming books are opposites of "Bridges of Madison Country".
BMC has a hefty bunch of enemies.
I think Who Moved My Cheese? is a very slight improvement on Chicken Soup for the Soul as an unsuggester. Sadly for Unfogged (but perhaps good for Western civilization) Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids, as perfectly soul-deadening a title as I've ever encountered, isn't owned by enough LibraryThing users to produce results. Anne McCaffrey's The Rowan produces Jonathan Safran Foer, so I may abandon that route; Daniel Quinn's wretched Ishmael was a disappointment, as was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (although the latter gave funny unsuggestions).
Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids
Oh my God, my soul just broke into three thousand tiny wretched pieces.
People who read Pynchon are less likely to appreciate the works of Tim LaHaye.
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul produces a pretty durn good list of science fiction -- Gibson, Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Snow Crash, Murakami, Walter Miller, Alan Moore, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, reasonably unwretched Heinlein and Asimov, Gravity's Rainbow. How do the Virgil, Sun Tzu, and Getting Things Done figure in?
Needless to say, an actual teenager would be better off reading nigh anything on that list, probably even the one Robert Jordan book I see.
Ah! Meet Samantha: An American Girl Novel. Thanks for the assist, Clownie.
50 -- nice. Be sure to sweep them up, you don't want heart fragments lying around. Somebody could trip and get hurt.
Who is Neal Stephenson? The overwhelming opposite of "National Velvet". It's downright eerie. Foucault and Borges didn't stand a chance.
# Getting things done : the art of stress-free productivity by David Allen
# Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
# The confusion by Neal Stephenson
# The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
# Watchmen by Alan Moore
# Snow crash by Neal Stephenson
# Zodiac : the eco-thriller by Neal Stephenson
# The history of sexuality, Volume I: An introduction by Michel Foucault
# The sputnik sweetheart : a novel by Haruki Murakami
# Collected fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
"Gone with the Wind". This is becoming fun:
# Structure and interpretation of computer programs by Harold Abelson
# Programming Ruby : the pragmatic programmers' guide by Dave Thomas
# The star fraction by Ken MacLeod
# Top 10 by Alan Moore
# ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham
# Factotum by Charles Bukowski
# Tales of ordinary madness by Charles Bukowski
# The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod
# Biblical preaching : the development and delivery of expository messages by Haddon W. Robinson
# The sky road by Ken MacLeod
Howard Rheingold scores again with "Little Women"
Terry Pratchett is also the opposite of "Valley of the Dolls"
The Joy of Sex: Palahniuk has 6 of the top 20 antis. This is a massively uncontemporary book. Look at the other names.
# The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
# Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
# The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams
# The devil in the white city : murder, magic, and madness at the fair that changed America by Erik Larson
# The devil wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
# Lullaby : a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
# Everything is illuminated : a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
# Survivor : a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
# A little princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
# The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
# Diary : a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
# You shall know our velocity by Dave Eggers
# Invisible monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
# Choke : a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
# On beauty : a novel by Zadie Smith (
# The sisterhood of the traveling pants by Ann Brashares
# Holidays on ice by David Sedaris
# The metamorphosis and other stories by Franz Kafka
# Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
# Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Botched the link to Meet Samantha. A Mercedes Lackey picked at random from her bibliography produces some decent ones; Rick Warren's opus turns up the first unsuggestion of Flann O'Brien I've come across so far as well as some good comic books. Weirdly, I am Charlotte Simmons unsuggests Calvin and Hobbes and a ton of vaguely terrifying fantasy novels.
"Atlas Shrugged" is the opposite of Flann O'Brien's "The Poor Mouth". "the Poor Mouth" is only the #2 opposite of "Atlas Shrugged"; #1 is Terry Pratchett, who's the opposite of everything.
33: The antithesis of "Great Expectations" is a lot of po-tech stuff by Howard Rheingold et al, PLUS a lot of Christian shit.
Pretty much everything seems to get you a fair amount of, uh, Christian shit but Middlesex is amazing. Apparently the Christians, they are not so into the whole hermaphrodite thing.
I'm suspecting that there's a large number of Pratchett readers who don't have many other books in their libraries.
A Month in the Country is an excellent book.
Dan Brown is the opposite of Robert Burton.
I think the same holds for Mercedes Lackey fans, John. And people who are really into books about the Rapture and how God wants them to be rich. (The Third Policeman turns up a bunch of religious books and presumptatively bad fantasy novels.)
"The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is among the top five opposites of "Wisconsin Death Trip." That and, of course, Terry Pratchett.
Amazingly, The Gold Bug Variations does not seem to be the opposite of Terry Pratchett, but rather of John Grisham.
The #1 opposite for Kafka's Metamorphosis is Vogue Knitting on the Go: Socks Two.
When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning he found that his feet had been amputated.
Who would have thought that James Frey's bete noire was Lois McMaster Bujold?!
I can just imagine them bumping into each other in an elevator at the 2005 ALA, each coolly sizing up the competition. "Frey." "Bujold." "What pleasant weather we're having." "Yes, but I think it's about to get ... hotter!" [Elevator door opens, Bujold rolls out into the gigantic glass and chrome hotel lobby while yanking her trusty Beretta 92FS out of its custom holster while Frey falls into a kneeling position and quickly unloads his GLOCK 23, ducking behind a large urn to reload.]
Slightly bizarrely, Roald Dahl's Matilda is the polar opposite of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.
(Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is also in the top ten. I see no reason not to own both Dahl and Jaynes; both have pride of place in my library.)
Little Women is opposite #1 of Word and Object, but only #2 of From a Logical Point of View.
Both Stephemson and Pratchett, as well as Murakami, are opposites of "Luther's Small Catechism":
# Snow crash by Neal Stephenson
# The wind-up bird chronicle by Haruki Murakami
# Fear and loathing in Las Vegas : a savage journey to the heart of the American dream by Hunter S. Thompson
# Blink : the power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
# How to be good by Nick Hornby
# Cloud atlas : a novel by David Mitchell
# Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murakami
# Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
# Stardust by Neil Gaiman
# The fifth elephant : a novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett
Except that the Librarything corpus is slanted, it seems that we could easily construct a Bourdieu-type map of The American Mind.
As it is, someone should easily be able to produce one of those graphs showing which books within this corpus are associated and dissociated. Presumably there is an algorithm to show which two books are farthest apart.
That Dan Brown and Terry Pratchett show up with such frequency suggests that the LibraryThing membership's taste is highly suspect. And The Shining is an opposite of Crowds and Power? How can this be?
The knitting book has the highest quality opposites yet. These are seriously non-literary people. But who the fuck is George Martin?
# The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
# A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
# Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
# Stranger in a strange land by Robert A. Heinlein
# Ender's game by Orson Scott Card
# Interview with the vampire by Anne Rice
# One flew over the cuckoo's nest : a novel by Ken Kesey
# Inferno by Dante Alighieri
# The old man and the sea by Ernest Hemingway
# A game of thrones by George R.R. Martin
A most-often-opposite list so far would include Pratchett, Gaiman, the Pants Sisters, Dan Brown, Dan Brown, and Murakami.
The Palahniuk-Joy of Sex antithesis, across six Palahniuk titles, is amazing.
The knitting book has the highest quality opposites yet.
Wow. You're not kidding.
George R.R. Martin is a fantasy writer whom I associate with a meh superheros-y shared world series, "Wild Cards", and a disastrously Boomer-fellating book called The Armageddon Rag, but Brad DeLong and (maybe?) some of the Crooked Timber people seem to enjoy the series of which A Game of Thrones is a part. (Stitch 'n' Bitch, meanwhile, doesn't throw up anything particularly embarassing - with the possible exception of Hume - and Hayek is on its opposites list, which is at least amusing. Damned knitting communitarians! Lillian Jackson Braun's list seems to skew heavily towards guy books -- Hemingway, Salinger, the Heaney Beowulf, Kafka. Interesting that Plath and Sarah Vowell fall onto that list.)
Laurell K. Hamiltonunch in "Herzog". Laurel Hamilton rules.
I'm starting to think that there's a bit of slack in the algorithm.
"Punch in" for "Laurell K. Hamiltonunch in".
No, I'm sorry, you're going to have to come up with an amusing definition for "Hamiltonunch".
It's a local idiom which is alway capitalized.
Michael Moore gets exclusively Christian opposites.
Also (oddly) Richard Bach.
Portnot's complaint top nine are all Mercedes Lackey. Different strokes, I guess.
When Mercedes Lackey terminated one of her series, she got death threats from fans and quit going to conventions.
17 of the top 20 unsuggestions for Hopscotch are Terry Pratchett.
Yeah, I don't want to sound any more crass or ignorant than I usually do around here, but do THAT many people really read Murakami? I'm not doubting his literary merit at all, it just seems odd that he shows up on so many disparate lists. While he is a writer of some stature, he hardly seems to write the kind of literary product that flies off the shelves into a vastly diverse group of hands. The Xtian and genre stuff, sure, but I don't get how he's everywhere at once.
Probably there are a few people who have some Murakami and not much else.
This is the best one yet. The moral is if you bring your children up on Norman Juster, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (to say nothing of Gogol, Dickens, Barthes, Stephen Fry, Shakespeare, and Berkeley Breathed), they will know better than to read a huckster's book full of dangerous lies about how to make money speculating in real estate.
93: Now hold on, Busy B: I think Carnegie's perfect opposite should win some kind of prize.
It would be a little bit more fun if you could filter out genres, like psycho-Xtian.
How to win friends and influence people is a pretty good book.
94 -- the top title on that list is awesome. Not quite as good but Philip Pullman appears to be the opposite of Norman Vincent Peale.
The opposite of the book of Mormon is Murakami. The opposite of the Bible is heavilly Pratchett.
I think that certain authors should be excluded from the final report.
Coulter yields a very literate list.
74 -- Alcott's Little Men is an opposite of the Bhagavad-Gita, FWIW.
This has been oodles of fun, but it's increasingly weird. Dan Savage's Gomorrah book opposite is Far from the Madding Crowd.
http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/30570
Unless people are fucking with us, it means that a significant proportion of Christians read Dan Savage.
When Mercedes Lackey terminated one of her series, she got death threats from fans and quit going to conventions.
That's what Lackey says, anyway. Others are, to put it mildly, skeptical.
If you got through all 2400 pages of Neal Stephenson's recent trilogy, you are not a Christian; not a woman; not interested in nutrition; and would never be caught reading any other series of fantasy books (see #24 and #56). Also, at some point you will have to confront the great truth found in #6.
71 was me btw. Of course, who else could it have been?
It would be a little bit more fun if you could filter out genres, like psycho-Xtian.
Yeah, if you take out the psycho-Xtianity and Josh Harris books, this might be the best list of all.
There seem to be two opposite poles, one represented by Pratchett and a few others, and the other Christian. Searches not dominated by these are sort of interesting.
106: Actually, that's not fair; those are mostly very serious Christian books. What we really need is for there not to be so many books about Christianity in this system. It weirds the results. This is just ridiculous.
108: "This" was supposed to link to this.
The opposite of "Lake Wobegon Days" is the Harry Potter Box Set. Make of this what you will. This is the weirdest and most mixed list so far.
# The Harry Potter boxed set by J.K. Rowling
# The pragmatic programmer : from journeyman to master by Andrew Hunt
# Twenty love poems and a song of despair by Pablo Neruda
# Mason-Dixon knitting by Kay Gardiner
# Junie B., first grader : cheater pants by Barbara Park
# Basics of biblical Greek : grammar by William D. Mounce
# [No title] (expected 9.8, found 0; unsuggestions)
# The Passion of Jesus Christ : fifty reasons why He came to die by John Piper
# Tris's book by Tamora Pierce
# Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop
A# 71: I don't know who you are, but that was awesome. Are you a Bujold fan by any chance?
Probably there are a few people who have some Murakami and not much else.
I know some of them.
Meanwhile, people who like Journey to the end of the night should not read: lots of Laurel Hamilton, Anne Rice, Anne McCaffery, or Mercedes Lackey. Which is a little odd, because I can see Anne Rice as a very Goth Céline.
But, you know--I think I'd rather read The Devil Wears Prada than The Road to Serfdom.
I was going to quit. But the opposite of "The Federalist Papers" is "A short history of tractors in Ukrainian" by Marina Lewycka.
They're fuckin with us. I know it.
John, "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" is a novel (and a very entertaining one).
It seems to be owned by people who own all the recent Booker Prize winners and no other books. I had no idea such people actually existed.
Another datapoint: Serious cooks do not read pop fiction.
I put in Catch 22 and got that Vogue knitting book as #1, but it's not on the reciprocal list. Pretty much everythign else was Christian, with a couple more knitting books thrown in.
Or rather, some people catalog their cookbooks and nothing else.
117. Possibly, but it strikes me as odd that someone would do that. However, I would think only people who really like their cookbooks would think of cataloging them. So, maybe it's those people who don't own pop fiction. (I, of course, am one of those people.)
99, meet 10, your long-lost twin.
By the way, I just discovered that the Mineshaft is right here in Durham.
Only just now?
I have written this up at my own site (go to me URL.) Thanks to everyone whose research I stole.
120: Huh. I must have a hole in my back pocket.
119: Jesus. Early onset senility is teh suck.
I threw in a few titles I own at random: Bridge of Birds, Fast Food Nation, A Wild Sheep Chase, Lords and Ladies, Life Outside, The Long Goodbye, The Caves of Steel, etc.
The thing that fascinates me is that Desiring God: Confessions of a Christian Hedonist comes up fairly high in the list for all or almost all of them, and I keep thinking, "Wow, that title sounds great!" I'm sure the book doesn't live up to the title, but that's a pretty great title. I'd probably prefer the book I want to imagine it to be to the actual book, though.
Are there people who own Pratchett and nothing else? Everyone I know who reads Pratchett is a pretty voracious reader of all genres. I've always kind of had the impression that fans of Pratchett generally dislike standard fantasy (such as Lackey).
What's this all this hatin on LISP, anyway? I've got Wuthering Heights on my bookshelf reasonably close to my thumbed-to-death copy of Steele's Common LISP the Language. Other books I own that supposedly don't coexist with Common LISP the Language: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Sun Also Rises, Franny & Zooey, The Scarlet Letter, Alice and Wonderland, Tom Sawyer, The Screwtape Letters, Persuasion, Nickle and Dimed, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Sense and Sensibility and Frankenstein.
Also I've got P. K. Dick's love story The Zap Gun just a few feet away from Toni Morrison's romance Sula.
Quite a troll you had over at Idiocentrism about this, John.
I get along with everyone, JM, including him. I've united the whole world, not with love, but with the Piranha brothers method: sarcasm and litotes.
So what you're saying is that you nailed his head to the floor.
A good mouseover text for the Unfogged logo would be: "The Vichy of Blogland".
Also: a commenter at Idiocentrism notes that Tove Jannson is the polar opposite of Ayn Rand, which I find awesome. (Speaking of Tove Jansson, the new collection of her cartoons is out, and it pwns! Get it from Amazon or Drawn and Quarterly. Here is a (pdf) excerpt.)