Speaking as a working author, Goodreads is a dumpster fire. One author of my acquaintance has been the victim of someone who has created at least six fake accounts in her name (taking her name and profile pics), in an attempt to trash her reputation; I've got off relatively lightly, but I've had one-star reviews posted of books of mine ... which aren't actually written yet, so these are basically fakes.
Goodreads reaction to complaints by (verified) authors about this sort of abuse is to deny all responsibility. So there's zero curation going on there.
(As to the list of abandoned reads, it's not surprising that the top five by ranking are all major bestsellers: and the shrunken, posterior proportions are for books with a difficult literary style to grapple with -- in other words, they're not easy reading. Between "hard to read" and "massive bestsellers, but require a reading age >12" we basically cover the obvious bases. I'd have liked to see some analysis of abandonment rate normalized for reading complexity, but that's hard to characterize ...)
> Goodreads reaction to complaints by (verified) authors about this sort of abuse is to deny all responsibility. So there's zero curation going on there.
Goodreads was bought by Amazon in 2013, so the issues you are describing are not surprising considering that Amazon.com reviews have the same issues.
Goodreads was far more useful before it became a part of Amazon, though maybe it was declining before that -- I guess before it got too popular. Much like imdb. Where once I found both useful, nowadays I don't ever bother except maybe after reading something where I am diametrically opposed to the universe and reviews. :)
I never quite figured out what changed -- whether it was gaming and abuse, Amazon buying and caring only about more sales, or simply no longer disproportionately early adopting geeks (inc me!). All I know is neither goodreads or imdb are the slightest use in deciding if I might enjoy something, where once they had been, and in its earliest days (when you downloaded db and client) imdb was almost frighteningly, telepathically good.
For GR or any other online review site, my experience is that they are useful if you read the negative reviews. A one-star (or two-star or three-star) review which complains about things which I, on the other hand, like, is reliable.
The actual star rating is not reliable, on GR or anywhere else on the internet in my experience.
I do the exact same thing for Yelp or TripAdvisor or product reviews: Read the actual text of the one-star reviews. Most are non-specific, or obviously a case of over-entitlement or completely misaligned expectations, those are noise.
But there are usually specific ones, and those are useful signal. Read those, and figure out if the specifics the person is complaining about is something that actually bothers you.
My understanding is that GoodReads is one of the most gamed review sites on the Internet.
Amazon has a concept of Influencer Reviewers, but they should almost immediately recognize this as bs. I've never met anyone who actually cares about a general product critic. Amazon isn't niche, so even if there is, say, some guy who reviews protein powders on Amazon, and you're really into protein powders... The odds of you finding this person are low, and since Amazon isn't designed in anyway for you to interact with this person, and find more content about protein powders, nutrition, fitness, etc -- it makes no sense for you to follow this person on Amazon.
Certainly, there are some influencer reviewers with genuine followers. But this should be an exception to the rule.
GoodReads on the other hand is a place that lends itself to an influencer. So it's much more difficult to tell who's posting real reviews and who's posting bullshit that's being liked by bots and then added to the first review most people see, and then just getting liked a lot because it's first -- not because it's any good.
Further, GoodReads is actually like the 8th biggest social network in the world and one of the most heavily trafficked websites online. These influencers can actually get a lot of eyeballs, but GoodReads provides almost no way for influencers to make money -- like YouTube, Pinterest, or even Instagram do (most Instagram influencers post ads almost exclusively now).
So GoodReads influencers have to get more creative and extortive to make any money.
Further, this problem is compounded because people don't finish books they don't like. Everyone watches plenty of TV and movies they don't like throughout the year, so they rate these on IMDB or wherever. They like reviews that are bad. This happens much less frequently on GoodReads. If you're an influencer, you learn very quickly that any negative review is unlikely to make the front page. And if you're trying to grow your following, that's all you really care about. So you need to post a ton of 5 star reviews. Well, books take a long time to read. I highly doubt these influencers have time to rate and write a review and make a video about their review for a novel every or two or three a day. Yet, they do. So the majority of these have to be fake just based on obvious time constraints.
> Amazon isn't designed in anyway for you to interact with this person
Amazon used to have more social features a decade ago: you could follow reviewers and talk with them, and there were message boards for the book-, music- or film-lover community as a whole. However, that functionality was gradually hidden on the site or outright removed. Apparently Amazon felt supporting it was too expensive and it didn’t appreciably increase sales, and for books it was made redundant after Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads.
I think while the ratings system is a dumpster fire, it does a huge service for readers still. You can easily track your reading list, books you're read (and sharing it with friends), and their app's scan feature is lovely for me personally when in bookstores to quickly add a book to my list. And they could improve a lot on this areas for sure.
In terms of reading tracking I think it's quite an interesting source and while the outcomes are not surprising, I think with just some better analysis this could be a very interesting piece. Props to the author for the idea alone.
Yep. I don't pay any attention to ratings, though I do go through and read reviews. Mostly the middle range ones (2-4 stars), because they're usually the people who can see some good and bad and comment on it more fairly than just those who leave 5 star or 1 star reviews. It's also nice to read reviews of people I follow and to see what they think of it.
Otherwise, I use it mainly to track what I've read and what I think of it. I wrote reviews for a while, and might start getting back to that this year, but it's really good for tracking my personal star rating of a book and to see what I think of stuff. It can also be useful for getting recommendations as well, based on their recommendation algorithms as well as similar books and ones people mention in reviews.
One author got hundrede of negative reviews for her non-published book because she posted a tweet photographing an anonymous subway employee illegally eating on the subway.
I actually went to the effort to report this brigading to Goodreads (and had a conversation with support staffabout how their Flag function doesn't work on mobile)
which they ignored.
Just out of curiousity, is there a different site in the same ballpark that you prefer? Or is this more of a fundamental (or at least unsolved) problem of sites with open access not paying for people to curate and therefore turning into either payola or a morass of extortion and lies?
> I'd have liked to see some analysis of abandonment rate normalized for reading complexity, but that's hard to characterize ...
Maybe one could do something like the Flesch-Kincaid reading index and variants of those and include other metrics like # of unique words. But it's be a real pain in the arse to do - you can get the books off Libgen, surely, but you'd have to choose manually and then often it'll be a PDF where the OCR or text layer is hot garbage...
Assuming that this is all largely fiction, you'll generally get a decent ePub of essentially any book published by a large publisher, and given that ePub is essentially just XHTML it's not "hard" to parse well enough for your purposes.
The margin of error for parsing the books is going to be smaller than any margin of error forced on you by GoodReads, anyway...
Yes, it isn't great... many top 'reviews' appear to be a platform for social justice posturing or indulgent navel gazing by the reviewer. Rather than you know, saying anything useful about the book.
As someone interested in publishing some work in the near future, I'd like to get your thoughts on this...
I've heard that GoodReads has become a Racket in that these "Book Influencers" reach out to authors and say they have two options: they can pay for a good review of their book, or they can get a bad review.
This seems like obvious extortion. Is this as bad as a problem as I've heard? Have you experienced this at all? Or do you know people who have?
Hah, Gravity's Rainbow definitely belongs on that list.
I tried to read it. Really, really tried. For my head it's utterly unreadable. Had to give up after ~30 pages.
The writing flow and style of that book can be best described as "long-winded, over-extended, bloated and bloviating, rejected entry to Bulwer-Lytton contest".
I love all kinds of weird humor but I could never get into POSTMODERN ZANINESS! a la Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. It's too all-over-the-place for me, and it honestly strikes me as mean-spirited.
I also like writing that is clean, pure, poetic and emotionally authentic. I feel like some of those authors (I'm looking at you, Wallace) are outsiders sniping at mainstream culture with hipster snobbishness. I used to sorta be that way, but I can't relate to that anymore.
Pynchon and DFW were convinced that that zaniness was the right direction for new fiction, led by John Barth (Giles Goat-Boy) and Donald Barthelme (Sixty Stories.) The stuff is ... not a lot of fun.
I think folks like Martin Amis did it a lot more entertainingly, though the self-aware sophistication is (sigh) a lot to bear.
Where DFW embodies the virtues you admire is his non-fiction -- Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I think are fascinating expositions into just how far down you have to dig to get at the emotionally authentic.
As for his fiction, I don't think he lived long enough to get all his sophomoric ideas out and get to material that actually mattered to him.
Wow, you summed up my thoughts on DFW better than I could have. I really tried to like Infinite Jest but it felt so... indulgent on the part of the author. Many parts felt like a real slog, with the only payoff being some weird joke the author found funny.
Gravity’s Rainbow was one of the toughest reads I’ve slogged through, but the depth and scale of it are nicely counterpoised with some downright hilarious scenes.
> I feel like some of those authors (I'm looking at you, Wallace) are outsiders sniping at mainstream culture with hipster snobbishness. I used to sorta be that way, but I can't relate to that anymore.
This is how I felt about his cruise ship manifesto. I get it, I get it, cruises are lowbrow, tacky and suck. But spare us all your hipster cooler than thou angst.
Ha - I read the cruise ship essay on the flight home a very miserable week at Disney World and it was exactly what I wanted. But that was a while ago; skimming it now it doesn't seem to have aged well.
It took me a few years and having to grapple with a few other authors in the postmodern canon, but once I pushed through, the novel "clicked" and it's now one of my favourites. Brilliant book.
I tried 3 times to read Gravity's Rainbow in proper order, but couldn't get engaged. Finally, I just started skipping forward reading portions of pages until I found something I found interesting. Eventually made it to the end, skipping occasionally when it threatened to become a slog. I knew I'd come back for the full experience once I understood the terrain better. And so I did.
I felt that way the first time I tackled it, but then trying again years later I really got into the flow of it. Something just clicks. It's like music that way; sometimes what's initially abrasive sounds good on revisit. Which isn't to suggest everyone can enjoy it, it is still very much an acquired taste. I still don't understand Joyce, for instance.
It is often described on the surface level as a zany espionage novel, thematically about psychology and paranoia, over the backdrop of the war. Confusion I suspect is part of the experience, but you gain a clearer picture of it as you go on (maybe). Anyway, not for everyone.
Keep reading! I felt the same way but ended up really liking it when I (finally) finished it. His style is tough, especially in that one. The Crying of Lot 49 would be an easier way to get into Pynchon, if you haven’t read that one yet.
I finally got through it. Had to read Mason & Dixon first, which was perhaps even harder to start off because of the Old English spellings. But after getting past that and realizing it was mostly just a funny story, the rest was pretty easy and enjoyable. Then coming back to GR was much easier.
Whether it was worth the time invested is another question entirely. ("No", I'm afraid, is the answer. There are better books along the same lines that are also challenging but less so. I recommend 100 Years of Solitude, Midnight's Children, or Tin Drum).
Avoid Ulysses. There's such bad, lame "philosophy of math" in there it really turned me off, made it seem like the whole book is just Joyce showing off how smart he thinks he is.
I was so disappointed to abandon Ulysses, but immediately felt better for it.
That book sat on my bedside table for months, making me feel bad for being unable to finish it, and giving me absolutly zero joy while I was reading it.
I don't think it means that nobody is enjoying those books, it's just that their reputation is rather high, but their actual target audience is much more narrow, or that the writing style isn't something that most people enjoy .
For instance I abandoned Lord of the Rings. In my view it's poorly written, boring, long-winded and to difficult to follow. That hardly means that it's a bad book, it's just not for me.
I have read it. There is no “point” in it, as with any other novel. It is a huge style exercise by a gifted writer, as far as I can see. I gather lots of chapters are autobiographical or nearly so.
The book is obviously too long and it becomes boring at places but there are certainly extraordinary passages (in style and in feeling). But as with Wagner’s operas, delight comes at a price.
Exactly. The "point" is enjoying it. If you enjoy it, it hardly matters what it's about or trying to say, and vice versa. I enjoyed it, so that's why I kept reading and rated it 5 stars.
"I also consider a model adjusting for covariates (author/average-rating/year), to see what books are most surprisingly often-abandoned given their pedigrees & rating etc."
Infinite Jest? Surprising? Have you actually tried reading that bloated example of The MFA Guy's Novel?
I also find myself wondering if American Gods would be #3 on the first version of this list if it had been compiled before the TV show version of that book.
I read and liked Infinite Jest, yes. But you are missing the point, and you are making the error which is why I spent several paragraphs discussing what it means to 'control for' something by adding it as a covariate in a model. No one is surprised that IJ is often abandoned, either in absolute or proportional; but it is more surprising that the model is surprised by IJ's abandonment rates even after taking into account that it's by DFW and its current star-ratings and when it was published.
Star ratings and author don't really capture why a human observer would expect a lot of people to start and abandon this book though. You'd need some kind of measure of difficulty and/or trendiness.
I hadn’t actually considered that. I’ve read 3 of the books on the top 5, and think they’re great books. But all of them have been made into TV shows now, which could explain it. Catch 22 is probably my favourite book of all time, but it’s long and kinda disorienting to read (every chapter is out of order, except for the last one). I guess it makes sense people would pick it up after watching the TV show, and then give up on it.
I enjoyed American Gods, but I read it when it first came out. There has subsequently been published an "Author's Preferred Text" edition, and I've heard from others that it's substantially longer without thereby being improved.
I don't know if Gwern's data accounts for this, or can, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's at the root of it. Anyway, if you're tempted to read it, try and find the original edit.
I'm a stickler for slogging through books even when I'm not feeling them- and will go back a second and third time to try and reattempt- but I gave up on American Gods because it was just such a bore and slow burn. I would have rather watched the paint dry or reruns of Friends.
For Game of Thrones I tried the audiobooks but Roy Dotrice was a horrible narrator- too breathy, too phlegmy and every character - even the women- had the same voice. I'd rather have had a straight read with someone not trying to act the characters than someone who did the all poorly. Game of Thrones is one of /r/audible on reddit's most requested to be re-recorded books. Would love to see them unleash an awesome narrator - such as Ray Porter - on them to really make them shine.
American Gods was the least favorite of the Gaiman books I've (tried to) read. I love Neverwhere, which might be my favorite book, and Stardust is up there too, but I just couldn't get into American Gods, and have avoided Anasazi Boys because of this.
I really liked Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book, all his short story collections, Coraline...and Stardust is probably in my top 5 favorite movies (so much to where I'm scared to read the book). I'm not a big Sandman fan...it is just so dark.
I laughed when I saw this list -- I've abandoned both American Gods and Catch-22 at some point. Technically I also abandoned The Glass Bead Game, but I don't think that counts since I was like 14 or something. (Someone had given it to my mother. I'm pretty sure she started and then abandoned it though.)
Glad I'm not the only one with Catch-22. A great book but could have been 1/3 the length; after a while it's all the same thing over and over and I only finished it because I had nothing else to read and just wanted to see if it had any ending (not happy about it either). I get that the repetition may have been done on purpose as literary artifice to reflect war or whatever, just found it too long and stretching the gimmicks.
Borges once wrote something about his father’s library. As a boy, his father told him that he was allowed to read anything he wanted from his vast library, on one condition: that if he found himself reading something he wasn’t interested in, he should immediately put it back rather than try to finish it.
This is a liberating perspective that I try, and fail, to maintain. If I abandon a book it’s no failing on my part, it’s a sensible reallocation of my time based on improved information. Continuing to read something you don’t want to read, just because you started it, is a terrible dunk cost fallacy.
I generally try and stick to that perspective. I have no reluctance to just stop when I've lost hope it's worth continuing, or I'm not enjoying something. There's been a few I came back to years later and have been very glad I did. Or with more recent works where trilogies are more common, stop when it's clear the second isn't a patch on a promising first. My exception more than validated that I should never feel I "must" finish, that makes just stopping quite easy now.
The only exception I can think of turned out to be an exercise in extreme foolishness (and a little ignorance), that turned into bloody minded penance to finish the set come what may. Love Arthur C Clarke, loved Rendezvous with Rama, it really deserved a great continuation. Read Rama 2 and it was slow, plodding and amateurish whilst being a mostly terrible follow-on that ignored most of what was in the original. OK, even Arthur's allowed a dud, it has to get better.
Garden of Rama was far, far worse, plot so weak you cringe, bullshit characterisation and even the science was awful. Probably the worst book I have ever read, bar none. Wife assures me the only times I have had a habit of muttering or yelling at books were Rama 3 and 4, probably to "fucking get on with it", maybe to make sense. No detectable trace of Clarke in 3 whatsoever.
Fool that I am, I tried again with Rama Revealed. 400 pages of badly imagined, plotless, garbage science rambling, that's taxonomy and biology of alien spiders and essentially nothing else, followed by "oh shit, almost out of pages, better figure out a point to this drivel", so immediate pace and plot change to 50 odd of pages of a weak, cliched, poorly imagined wrap up of the "why" of all 4. Entirely predictable cliche as ending. Second worst book ever. So carrying on for 2.5 books was pointless self-torture.
Eventually found out, as it wasn't mentioned anywhere (it's tucked away on Lee's Wikipedia page, or was), that Clarke revealed he contributed only some ideas, Lee did all the atrocious writing on 2-4. Clarke on the cover is an outright con. Reread Rendezvous to cleanse my soul.
The only book I’ve abandoned was Naked Lunch. I’ve enjoyed some slog books like Infinite Jest which the article mentioned, I enjoy shocking fiction and films, but something about that book cut to the quick of my imagination and just freaking grossed me out. I couldn’t power through it.
I still think about finishing it one day. The thought of it won’t leave me alone and it’s been years now. To many other books to read though, and time is scarce!
I've read The Naked Lunch. The first 10-20 pages are an interesting window into a different world, and the writing style really grabbed me. Then it gets incredibly repetitive and boring. Don't feel bad about not finishing it.
There are a lot of nonfiction books where I expect the data would show me as having abandoned it, but really I think the books are just too long. Popularizations of scientific research fit this category very well -- halfway into most of them I'm pretty convinced I've gotten everything out of them already.
Funny thing, reading books. There are many that I read at one time and enjoyed. Today, I look at them again and wonder how I got through them. Would I still read all of Godel, Escher, Bach? Ehhh... The clock keeps ticking.
That was before internet. It completely changed my reading habits. There was a (surprisingly) huge backlog of non-fiction things I wanted to know more about. Books about history, for example, were always a snooze; that changed when I was able to pick the creator, exact era, topic and dosage. Reading about places? Nah. Watching videos about them? Yes. How long will mortals enjoy such powers?
A few living authors still have the power to pull me in just by publishing. But one or two books I bought years ago are still waiting - pre-abandoned?
I find myself reading a lot of fantasy, and I use GR to track the reading that I do. I have to be honest, I find it really useful, especially if you are undecided as to whether you want to purchase a particular book or not.
The negative reviews (1 or 2 star reviews) will often highlight the parts of the book that the reviewer did not like, and that is often something that determines whether or not I purchase the book or not.
I was so excited to read Glass Bead Game. I waited till the end, having read most of Hesse's other major works before tackling his magnum opus. I was so disappointed in it, and I too put it down. Part of me wonders if something was lost in translation with that work.
I read a French translation of it a decade ago and remember it as a fairly interesting book. It has an intriguing premise which it uses cleverly to explore a large range of subjects, is fairly well written and is an interesting commentary on what constitutes a bildungsroman.
It is not particularly plot driven however so I'm a bit confused by the idea of it going somewhere.
I suppose technically I have abandoned it too, but I will never admit to it. I fully intend to pick it up again and finish it so it sits on the shelf and stares at me instead.
It would be less entertaining, however, as everyone enjoys taking books down a peg, and it's not possible because as I discuss, GR hides the low absolute count entries from public display. Ideally you'd want all the books with 0 'abandon' tags, but GR will not show you those. It only shows books with at least 40 abandon tags. So you can estimate the least-abandoned within the most-abandoned, so to speak, but that's a pretty arbitrary thing to look at.
If a book is almost never abandoned, that might only indicate that it is short, or really easy, neither of which are hard to tell from a few seconds inspection. This tells you something you might not otherwise know from a few seconds' inspection.
I imagine the least abandoned would be something that comes late in a series (or at least from an author with many similar books), where basically everyone who picks it up already knows that they will like it (those who don't were filtered out by the earlier books).
Eh - I’m not sure the type of intellectual who I’d guess is the target audience for ‘Gravity’s
Rainbow’ or ‘The Three Body Problem’ are not the types to be highly enthusiastic about Harry Potter.
Just like someone who is into some of the best/most intellectually challenging Anime probably wouldn’t be all that impressed by The Simpsons.
Someone who appreciates the subtle, carefully crafted humor of the early Simpsons wouldn't be interested in Anime. I can engage in silly media elitism too.
My point is, you don't make something as successful as Harry Potter or the Simpsons without making some smart decisions and appealing to at least a few very intelligent people.
No, you can pretty much make successful things without that. The Da Vinci Code sold 80 million copies, for example. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series sold 160 million copies over 11 books: James Patterson's Maximum Ride books sold 30 million over 8. Neither of the latter have had anywhere near the media blitz Rowling has had. The goosebumps series in told sold a staggering 400 million copies over its length.
Its frustrating because in general these big doorstopper books are usually really bad at kid lit. Harry Potter honestly can't hold a candle to books like Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey, or Barbary by Vonda MacIntyre. John Christopher in particular wrote these tiny books that are just master classes in economy; The White Mountains and The Lotos Caves stuck with me for decades. William Sleator managed to do actual intelligent SF for kids, with even some horror to it...something like Interstellar Pig is really surprising even as an adult. Joan Aiken really is a wonderful author too.
Its just stuff like potter gets relentlessly pushed and snowballs a lot. There's a lot more of the hive mind instinct that we think, at times.
"Just like someone who is into some of the best/most intellectually challenging Anime probably wouldn’t be all that impressed by The Simpsons."
Current Simpsons perhaps not. Seasons 1-8 Simpsons, though, quite possibly. Much more intelligent than the current stuff. Though it does suffer from being completely episodic; there are several episodes that deftly handle some character's development, but almost none of it gets to stick around until next week. On that front it definitely isn't a good anime.
Hey! Myself as well - however, we are an incredible minority. (Actually a Simpsons junkie, go to trivia nights etc, also attend Anime North, etc - we are very edge-case folks.)
Somewhat orthogonal, I've never been so disappointed by a follow up work than I have with Marlon James; from Brief History of Seven Killings to Black Leopard Red Wolf (the most abandoned book on the "to" list). Seems I'm not alone in this feeling!
About a week ago I put down "Black Leopard Red Wolf" after a few hundred pages and absolutely little desire to continue slogging through it. So when I saw the book on this list and blog post mentioned often throughout - ha. I had to chuckle.
As many others have said before, I'm sure there's an argument for it being an objectively great book, but for me it just did absolutely nothing.
I learned a long time ago that there was no shame in stopping when you realize you get no enjoyment from reading a book. I have no problem writing off that sunk cost.
Heartbroken to see "I Am A Cat" on there. Granted, it's probably too fanciful for many (and a lot gets lost in translation) but Soseki is one author I'd like to see get more attention in the West.
The website itself is also interesting, with informative content and minimalist aesthetics. The link previews on hover are particularly interesting, similar to the Wikipedia one. What's the tech stack behind?
The popups are really cool - I don't think I'd realised before that it's for more than just Wikipedia. The Amazon previews are great.
I know nothing about design/typography, but I find it easier to read sites that are more spaced out, use sans-serif fonts, and have colours. I think the site looks beautiful (especially the drop caps!) but I wouldn't call it minimalist.
Not surprised Space Opera was on the list. Hated it, and only finished it because I was hoping that eventually the style would settle down and the book would improve. It didn’t.
Once it gets to the actual aliens though, some amazing ideas. First time in awhile I've felt that the aliens were really alien, some great ideas in there.
FWIW I listened to the audio book version, the reading of it was rather nice and added to the humor.
Yeah that was why I stuck with it - there were some good ideas buried in there.
I’m quite happy to endure thin characters, wooden dialogue and clunky prose (hi Asimov and PKD) if the ideas are good. But the tone of this one was trying too hard. Just wanted it to settle down and tell a decent story.
This is a great lesson in "knowing your data" vs. "creating a model". The validity of the generated model is tainted by the GIGO principle. Said another way, modeling bad data will get you bad models.
Goodreads reaction to complaints by (verified) authors about this sort of abuse is to deny all responsibility. So there's zero curation going on there.
(As to the list of abandoned reads, it's not surprising that the top five by ranking are all major bestsellers: and the shrunken, posterior proportions are for books with a difficult literary style to grapple with -- in other words, they're not easy reading. Between "hard to read" and "massive bestsellers, but require a reading age >12" we basically cover the obvious bases. I'd have liked to see some analysis of abandonment rate normalized for reading complexity, but that's hard to characterize ...)