Anti-Books
 

(H/T to Fontana Labs at Unfogged, and
thanks to the posters there).

Bookpress did its own investigation

Who doesn't read Victorian chick lit?

Valve discussion of the above

When I was young I knew that dog and cat, male and female, and summer and winter were opposites, but I never figured out whether the opposite of salt was pepper or sugar. This was childish thinking, of course -- the only opposite of "a" is "not-a".

Be that as it may, a software has recently been developed making it possible to find the opposite of any moderately popular book. LibraryThing allows people to catalog their personal libraries in a publicly-accessible database, and from this database it is possible to find out, not only which books are most likely to be found together in one library, but also which books are least likely to be found together. The positive searches are often pretty banal -- people who own Bellow's Herzog are likely to own other books by Bellow (and also books by Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, et al.) But the negative searches allow you to find the anti-book for any given book --  the book which is most unexpectedly absent from libraries in which the first book is found.

Here are a few examples of anti-books:

These pairs have been chosen because they are interesting. More random searches reveal that there are a considerable number of authors whose books which are the opposites of almost everything else:  Terry Pratchett above all, but also Ann Brashares, Sophie Kinsella, John Piper, Wayne Grudem, Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, Mercedes Lackey, James Patterson, Laura K. Hamilton, Haruki Murakami, Lauren Weisberger, Dan Brown, and Chuck Palahniuk. Furthermore, some of these universal opposites are also opposites of each other.

It seems that some people buy only one kind of book, and these seem to be of three kinds: pulp fiction (e.g. Pratchett), contemporary lifestyle fiction (e.g. Brashares), and  Christian books (e.g. John Piper). The Christian books are opposite to the other two categories, but there's a considerable tension between the lifestyle  books and the pulp fiction too.  All three categories are the opposites of modernist, decadent, and cynical literature, and the lifestyle and pulp books tend to be opposed to all serious literature of any kind.

Miscellaneous observations: The Joy of Sex is the anti-Palahniuk, and terribly unhip. The anti-Vogue Knitting on the Go: Socks Two gives you one hell of a reading list, as does anti-Ann Coulter. The anti-Lake Wobegon Days includes Pablo Neruda and Arthur Rimbaud. (This list is a real jumble -- it seems that almost everyone has Keillor's book). Christine Feehan is the anti-Mark Twain and the anti-Herman Melville; knitters also avoid Twain and Melville. Mercedes Lackey is the anti-Portnoy. (Different strokes, I guess). Anti-Wuthering Heights is half programming and half Christian. Anti-Michael Moore is all Christian, but anti-Dan Savage only includes three contemporary Christian books in the top twenty -- plus two Christian classics. (In other words, Christians read the fuck books -- but we already knew that). 

Flann O"Brien has been one of my favorite authors for awhile now, and I really should write about him some time. For the moment let me just report that the anti-Poor Mouths include Atlas Shrugged, The World is Flat, The Purpose-Driven Life, a Douglas Adams, a Michael Crichton, and two Orson Scott Cards, plus fluff; and the anti-Third Policemen and the anti-At-Swim-Two-Birds are almost all Christian, fantasy, or fluff. Even the few fairly decent authors not read by O'Brien readers seem quite fitting: John Calvin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Chuck Palahniuk, David Sedaris, and David McCullough.

Bookthing catalogs 7,105,025 books owned by 102,068 members. This is obviously a rather small and unrepresentative self-selected sample, and some of the specific antitheses I've found (e.g. Hardy vs.  Savage) are presumably more or less accidental. It would be a mistake to think that the Bookthing database gives us the Geography of the American Mind, but nonetheless I think that the tidbits we at Unfogged found were interesting enough to justify an actual statistical analysis.

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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