The trouble with the goodreads algorithm

The trouble with the goodreads “if you liked x, you will like y” algorithm is that it assumes, every time, that if you liked a book, it must have been because of the plot. What I like about a book is almost never the plot.

Oh, sure, there are certain common characteristics in at least some of the books I’ve liked best: I tend to prefer realistic, contemporary settings over past or future ones and fantasy ones, and if a book has strong women, or queer characters, or people who have difficult jobs that they agonize over, or people figuring out who they are, or clashes between people of different social classes, or people dealing with hard relationships of all sorts, I am more likely to give it a second look than if it doesn’t. But a book doesn’t require any of those elements to be interesting to me. And I’m certainly never going to like a book simply because it contains one or more of those elements.

Here are some of the things that actually will predict my liking of a book:

I like books that tell me something about a crucial time in the characters’ lives, one of those periods the characters will look back on when they’re old and with 20/20 hindsight be able to say: “that, there, was the turning point” about. I like books where the characters learn things and change as a result of those experiences, even if it’s not necessarily for the better.

I like books with characters who have admirable strengths, but also scornworthy/pitiable/upsetting weaknesses. I like books with characters who are difficult and complicated, and where the things that happen over the course of the story make those complications even more acute. I like books with characters who make you love them anyway, despite all that.

I like books that know where they live right down to their bones, books that plant deep roots in their locations and make the reader forget they’re not there themselves. In descriptions first and foremost, but also in subtler ways: cultural knowledge, assumptions, language use. I like books where that sense of place is just there, in a way that permeates everything without ever having to be pointed out or explained.

I like books that inhabit the minds of their characters in the same way they inhabit those places: unflinchingly, and without any intrusion from the outside world or any sort of intellectual distance. I like books that are so good at living inside of their characters that for a little while, they can actually make you forget who you are.

I like books whose stories you can never, ever predict the endings to based on pre-existing knowledge you have about whatever genre the book has been shoehorned into, but at the same time you might well be able to predict their endings based on information you have about the specific people those stories are about. And yet that doesn’t matter, because the road the story takes on the way there is still so interesting.

I like books that have earned endings, whether happy or unhappy or (my favourite!) somewhere in between.

I like books that have language that sings, but never too loudly (and, whenever it’s necessary, off-key).

I like books where whatever the characters and their stories requires takes precedence over any of the above things. In fact, I like books where whatever the characters and their stories requires takes precedence over any reader’s (or even the author’s) preferences for anything. I like books that are courageous enough to allow the characters their own independent lives, books that create a space for them to breathe on their own and then let them go.

An algorithm will never be able to take any of those things — the actual important things — into account. Instead, it will always assume that I will like Mordecai Richler because I liked Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, books about Nigeria because I’m enjoying one book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, other crime series because I liked Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad books (even if those other crime series are conventional procedurals, which bear no resemblance to what Tana French’s work is doing at all), or other southern U.S. “chick lit” because I’ve liked everything Joshilyn Jackson has written. While those recommendations might sometimes introduce me to a book I end up liking, those successes are more likely to be accidental than a result of the algorithm’s real predictive ability.

To be fair, Goodreads is just one example of this — the Amazon algorithm is no better, and Netflix isn’t any more likely to find me movies or television shows to love than Goodreads is to find me books to love. All of these algorithms assume that a four-or-five-star-rating must have been a result of the story’s genre, or at best its plot specifics. And while that might possibly work for some people, it doesn’t get at any of the things I personally care about most.