Can you recommend a book for me?
As a reader you come accross this from time to time, right? Since you read so much you must be able to recommend a book for me, right? Wrong! Well, sort of.
Sure I read over 200 books every year and my taste isn't too selective, I read pretty much anything as long as it's not horror and even then I occasionally read a scary book I didn't initially realise was scary. I like literary fiction, biographies and autobiographies, historical fiction and factual books, classics, some fantasy (I've specialized in fantasy that involves libraries and librarians or books in any form) etc. The only types of books I'm not overly keen on are poetry, short stories (although I do read them too), the afore mentioned horror stories and romance novels (and yes, you guessed it, I sometimes read them too).
So with all those books under my belt why wouldn't I recommend a book for you?
As many tastes as there are books
Cataloging my books I use Goodreads. It's one of the go to apps for us bookish people and it not only helps you keep track of what you've read but also what's out there, what your friends are reading and what others think of the books you're reading or thinking of reading. And herein lies the problem.
With millions of books out there a lot of them seem to be highly appreciated by the Goodreads community. Say you've just finished a book and you didn't like it very much. In fact you may have hated is to much that you wanted to dnf it mid read but because you don't not finish books you struggle to the bitter end and the minute you turn the last page you open your Goodreads app to log in your latest read (got to keep those reading challenge stats up to date!).
You're still grumpy from not liking the book much but what do you notice on your reading app? The book has an average score of almost 4 out of 5!! This is crazy, you think to yourself. Am I the only one who hated this book? After a short scroll you finally find a like minded reader who's also given the book 2 stars and is listing all the problems you had with it in their review. This makes you feel a tiny bit better but you're still clearly in the minority. "A masterpiece!", "This book will make you weep!", "A beautiful tale!" cry all the other reviews.
Why would you recommend this to me?!
I think on Goodreads, unlike in other online platforms people are more eager to give good reviews than bad. If you like a book you want to tell the world! We just have different tastes and like to read different books.
Which brings me back to my original dilemma of recommending books. I only ever recommend books to my closest friends whos tastes in literatjure I'm already familiar with so I can be pretty sure I won't make a huge mistake in my recommendation. And even then I might go horribly wrong.
My best friend and I have been recommending books, films and tv programs to each other for decades now and even we sometimes don't understand each others tastes. Does it matter if you recommend a book your friend won't like? Perhaps not. But I don't know if I ever get over my best friend not liking Mark Z. Danielewski's The House of Leaves, my favourite book at the time. She absolutely hated it and let me know it. I've not been able to re-read the book ever since, I worry I might not like it anymore.
So you can ask me for recommendations, but the most you will get is: "I really liked this, but you might not". Which is totally unfair as I'm always on the lookout for something new to read. Can you recommend a book for me?
