Last year as I was compiling the year’s Book Club end of year considerations, I decided to add to some of our tabulating since starting the club. As we have finished our 10th year, I wanted to update our look as we refine our long term prognostications.
I have updated the recommender cube. This looks at the scores given by each member for each other member’s book recommendation. Ultimately it is designed (vaguely) to suggest who appreciate whose recommendations more than others.
What do we learn? Well most of us do rate our own recommendations relatively generously. But we also learn that MH favours recommendations from BC, DK favours BM’s recommendations, SD likes DK and RM’s recommendations, JOD likes those from FOS and MH, FOS likes those from JW, BM likes JOD’s, SD likes those from RM and that is reciprocated. There are actually some fairly significant trends there – but they actually have not changed between this year and last. There’s a consistency in our tastes.
I have also noted this year the less inclined to appreciate and marked this with a red square. The name of the recommender is down the left side and the scorer is along the top. For example, if BC recommends the book, the likelihood is that SD probably won’t be the higher scorer (sorry BC).
Likewise, over time do extract our top books of all time. we also can extract our Top Ten Books of All-Time…drum roll please – alas there was no change to this list this year, we didn’t add a big winner.:
Our top monthly scored all-time best read remains Alexander Hamilton a non-fiction one and we tend to favour these over our fiction reads, nonetheless, there is a good mix here. When looking at the I can also note that our top monthly read did not end up as our year-end book of the year.
However, there were changes in our specific genre lists. Although we didn’t add any stupendous fiction reads this year, we actually added two books to our all-time Top 10 Non-Fiction Reads.
Again, and this is interesting to me – we tend to rate non-fiction higher than fiction and yet here with our top ten non-fiction reads of all time.
Similarly, and strangely, we added to both our worst non-fiction and fiction Lowest 5 performers. I didn’t feel we had that bad a year in reading, but the additions to the list might make one wonder.
Here are our worst rated non-fiction reads:
I will note two things here. Our worst non-fiction had substantially higher ratings than our worst fiction and more interestingly, our most all come from the past two years. We are either reading worse books or simply selecting badly.
Our best fiction over the past ten years remained unchanged:
But again, we added our worst rated fiction this year. Not good.
Dangerously, our less liked reads are recent reds are tending towards the less well-liked than finding the next group blockbuster – either or we are simply growing old and becoming curmudgeonly ;-).
On to a great year of reading in 2022!