goodreads jonathan strange and mr norrell

The book review website/social network GoodReads (2006–) is probably the single largest book-focused website in the Anglosphere-it is almost as widely used by authors, who as much as they may despise it, can’t live without it. These results are interesting for how they highlight how people read books for many reasons (such as marketing campaigns, literary prestige, or following a popular author), and this is reflected in their decision whether to continue reading or to abandon a book. Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002), David Sedarisīooks at the top of the adjusted list appear to reflect a mix of highly-popular authors changing genres, and ‘prestige’ books which are highly-rated but a slog to read.Abandon rates increase the newer a book is, and the lower the average rating. 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. The Witches: Salem, 1692⁠, Stacy Schiff.

I fix that to see what more correct rankings look like.Ĭorrecting for both changes the top-5 ranking completely, from ( raw counts): There is also residual error from the winner’s curse where books with fewer ratings are more mis-estimated than popular books. This conflates popularity with probability of being abandoned: a popular but rarely-abandoned book may have more abandoned tags than a less popular but often-abandoned book. The default GoodReads tag interface presents only raw counts of tags, not counts divided by total ratings ( = reads). What books are hardest for a reader who starts them to finish, and most likely to be abandoned? I scrape a crowdsourced tag⁠, abandoned, from the GoodReads book social network on to estimate conditional probability of being abandoned.

Goodreads jonathan strange and mr norrell