
The Most Abandoned Books on GoodReads (2019) - Hooke
https://www.gwern.net/GoodReads
======
cstross
Speaking as a working author, Goodreads is a dumpster fire. One author of my
acquaintance has been the victim of someone who has created at least six fake
accounts in her name (taking her name and profile pics), in an attempt to
trash her reputation; I've got off relatively lightly, but I've had one-star
reviews posted of books of mine ... which aren't actually written yet, so
these are basically fakes.

Goodreads reaction to complaints by (verified) authors about this sort of
abuse is to deny all responsibility. So there's zero curation going on there.

(As to the list of abandoned reads, it's not surprising that the top five by
ranking are all major bestsellers: and the shrunken, posterior proportions are
for books with a difficult literary style to grapple with -- in other words,
they're not easy reading. Between "hard to read" and "massive bestsellers, but
require a reading age >12" we basically cover the obvious bases. I'd have
liked to see some analysis of abandonment rate normalized for reading
complexity, but that's hard to characterize ...)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Goodreads was far more useful before it became a part of Amazon, though maybe
it was declining before that -- I guess before it got too popular. Much like
imdb. Where once I found both useful, nowadays I don't ever bother except
maybe after reading something where I am diametrically opposed to the universe
and reviews. :)

I never quite figured out what changed -- whether it was gaming and abuse,
Amazon buying and caring only about more sales, or simply no longer
disproportionately early adopting geeks (inc me!). All I know is neither
goodreads or imdb are the slightest use in deciding if I might enjoy
something, where once they had been, and in its earliest days (when you
downloaded db and client) imdb was almost frighteningly, telepathically good.

~~~
rossdavidh
For GR or any other online review site, my experience is that they are useful
if you read the negative reviews. A one-star (or two-star or three-star)
review which complains about things which I, on the other hand, like, is
reliable.

The actual star rating is not reliable, on GR or anywhere else on the internet
in my experience.

~~~
Swenrekcah
I don’t know if the incentives are there for goodread, but be aware that
online sellers, at for instance amazon, have gamed this method as well.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
My understanding is that GoodReads is one of the most gamed review sites on
the Internet.

Amazon has a concept of Influencer Reviewers, but they should almost
immediately recognize this as bs. I've never met anyone who actually cares
about a general product critic. Amazon isn't niche, so even if there is, say,
some guy who reviews protein powders on Amazon, and you're really into protein
powders... The odds of you finding this person are low, and since Amazon isn't
designed in anyway for you to interact with this person, and find more content
about protein powders, nutrition, fitness, etc -- it makes no sense for you to
follow this person on Amazon.

Certainly, there are some influencer reviewers with genuine followers. But
this should be an exception to the rule.

GoodReads on the other hand is a place that lends itself to an influencer. So
it's much more difficult to tell who's posting real reviews and who's posting
bullshit that's being liked by bots and then added to the first review most
people see, and then just getting liked a lot because it's first -- not
because it's any good.

Further, GoodReads is actually like the 8th biggest social network in the
world and one of the most heavily trafficked websites online. These
influencers can actually get a lot of eyeballs, but GoodReads provides almost
no way for influencers to make money -- like YouTube, Pinterest, or even
Instagram do (most Instagram influencers post ads almost exclusively now).

So GoodReads influencers have to get more creative and extortive to make any
money.

Further, this problem is compounded because people don't finish books they
don't like. Everyone watches plenty of TV and movies they don't like
throughout the year, so they rate these on IMDB or wherever. They like reviews
that are bad. This happens much less frequently on GoodReads. If you're an
influencer, you learn very quickly that any negative review is unlikely to
make the front page. And if you're trying to grow your following, that's all
you really care about. So you need to post a ton of 5 star reviews. Well,
books take a long time to read. I highly doubt these influencers have time to
rate and write a review and make a video about their review for a novel every
or two or three a day. Yet, they do. So the majority of these have to be fake
just based on obvious time constraints.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Amazon isn't designed in anyway for you to interact with this person

Amazon used to have more social features a decade ago: you could follow
reviewers and talk with them, and there were message boards for the book-,
music- or film-lover community as a whole. However, that functionality was
gradually hidden on the site or outright removed. Apparently Amazon felt
supporting it was too expensive and it didn’t appreciably increase sales, and
for books it was made redundant after Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads.

------
bostik
Hah, Gravity's Rainbow _definitely_ belongs on that list.

I tried to read it. Really, really tried. For my head it's utterly unreadable.
Had to give up after ~30 pages.

The writing flow and style of that book can be best described as "long-winded,
over-extended, bloated and bloviating, rejected entry to Bulwer-Lytton
contest".

~~~
asdfman123
I love all kinds of weird humor but I could never get into _POSTMODERN
ZANINESS!_ a la Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. It's too all-over-the-place
for me, and it honestly strikes me as mean-spirited.

I also like writing that is clean, pure, poetic and emotionally authentic. I
feel like some of those authors (I'm looking at you, Wallace) are outsiders
sniping at mainstream culture with hipster snobbishness. I used to sorta be
that way, but I can't relate to that anymore.

~~~
blueboo
Pynchon and DFW were convinced that that zaniness was the right direction for
new fiction, led by John Barth (Giles Goat-Boy) and Donald Barthelme (Sixty
Stories.) The stuff is ... not a lot of fun.

I think folks like Martin Amis did it a lot more entertainingly, though the
self-aware sophistication is (sigh) a lot to bear.

Where DFW embodies the virtues you admire is his non-fiction -- Consider the
Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I think are fascinating expositions into
just how far down you have to dig to get at the emotionally authentic.

As for his fiction, I don't think he lived long enough to get all his
sophomoric ideas out and get to material that actually mattered to him.

~~~
randomcarbloke
Couldn't agree more, Consider the Lobster is beautifully written and
completely captivating.

------
greatquux
Um sorry but I really liked Dhalgren and Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest.
I may actually use this list to find some new books to read.

~~~
corrigible
Could you possibly explain the _point_ of Infinite Jest? I got through about..
40% or so. The incessant tennis wore me out.

~~~
pfortuny
I have read it. There is no “point” in it, as with any other novel. It is a
huge style exercise by a gifted writer, as far as I can see. I gather lots of
chapters are autobiographical or nearly so.

The book is obviously too long and it becomes boring at places but there are
certainly extraordinary passages (in style and in feeling). But as with
Wagner’s operas, delight comes at a price.

~~~
greatquux
Exactly. The "point" is enjoying it. If you enjoy it, it hardly matters what
it's about or trying to say, and vice versa. I enjoyed it, so that's why I
kept reading and rated it 5 stars.

------
egypturnash
"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."

Infinite Jest? Surprising? Have you actually tried _reading_ that bloated
example of The MFA Guy's Novel?

I also find myself wondering if American Gods would be #3 on the first version
of this list if it had been compiled before the TV show version of that book.

~~~
gwern
I read and liked Infinite Jest, yes. But you are missing the point, and you
are making the error which is why I spent several paragraphs discussing what
it means to 'control for' something by adding it as a covariate in a model. No
one is surprised that IJ is often abandoned, either in absolute or
proportional; but it is more surprising that the model is surprised by IJ's
abandonment rates even after taking into account that it's by DFW and its
current star-ratings and when it was published.

~~~
Avamander
I'm sure Infinite Jest has a certain type of people to like it though, it
isn't "missing a point", it's personal preference.

~~~
x1798DE
I think gwern is saying that the parent post is missing the point of the
"surprising" metric, not missing the point of Infinite Jest.

------
gwd
I laughed when I saw this list -- I've abandoned both American Gods and
Catch-22 at some point. Technically I also abandoned The Glass Bead Game, but
I don't think that counts since I was like 14 or something. (Someone had given
it to my mother. I'm pretty sure she started and then abandoned it though.)

------
lazyant
Glad I'm not the only one with Catch-22. A great book but could have been 1/3
the length; after a while it's all the same thing over and over and I only
finished it because I had nothing else to read and just wanted to see if it
had any ending (not happy about it either). I get that the repetition may have
been done on purpose as literary artifice to reflect war or whatever, just
found it too long and stretching the gimmicks.

~~~
adwww
I nearly abandoned it, but somehow slodged on, and on finishing it, it
suddenly became my favourite book (much to my surprise).

------
larnmar
Borges once wrote something about his father’s library. As a boy, his father
told him that he was allowed to read anything he wanted from his vast library,
on one condition: that if he found himself reading something he wasn’t
interested in, he should immediately put it back rather than try to finish it.

This is a liberating perspective that I try, and fail, to maintain. If I
abandon a book it’s no failing on my part, it’s a sensible reallocation of my
time based on improved information. Continuing to read something you don’t
want to read, just because you started it, is a terrible dunk cost fallacy.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I generally try and stick to that perspective. I have no reluctance to just
stop when I've lost hope it's worth continuing, or I'm not enjoying something.
There's been a few I came back to years later and have been very glad I did.
Or with more recent works where trilogies are more common, stop when it's
clear the second isn't a patch on a promising first. My exception more than
validated that I should never feel I "must" finish, that makes just stopping
quite easy now.

The only exception I can think of turned out to be an exercise in extreme
foolishness (and a little ignorance), that turned into bloody minded penance
to finish _the set_ come what may. Love Arthur C Clarke, loved Rendezvous with
Rama, it really deserved a great continuation. Read Rama 2 and it was slow,
plodding and amateurish whilst being a mostly terrible follow-on that ignored
most of what was in the original. OK, even Arthur's allowed a dud, it _has_ to
get better.

Garden of Rama was far, far worse, plot so weak you cringe, bullshit
characterisation and even the science was awful. Probably the worst book I
have ever read, bar none. Wife assures me the only times I have had a habit of
muttering or yelling at books were Rama 3 and 4, probably to "fucking get on
with it", maybe to make sense. No detectable trace of Clarke in 3 whatsoever.

Fool that I am, I tried again with Rama Revealed. 400 pages of badly imagined,
plotless, garbage science rambling, that's taxonomy and biology of alien
spiders and essentially nothing else, followed by "oh shit, almost out of
pages, better figure out a point to this drivel", so immediate pace and plot
change to 50 odd of pages of a weak, cliched, poorly imagined wrap up of the
"why" of all 4. Entirely predictable cliche as ending. Second worst book ever.
So carrying on for 2.5 books was pointless self-torture.

Eventually found out, as it wasn't mentioned anywhere (it's tucked away on
Lee's Wikipedia page, or was), that Clarke revealed he contributed only some
ideas, Lee did all the atrocious writing on 2-4. Clarke on the cover is an
outright con. Reread Rendezvous to cleanse my soul.

Live and learn, and oh boy did I learn. :)

------
sixstringtheory
The only book I’ve abandoned was Naked Lunch. I’ve enjoyed some slog books
like Infinite Jest which the article mentioned, I enjoy shocking fiction and
films, but something about that book cut to the quick of my imagination and
just freaking grossed me out. I couldn’t power through it.

I still think about finishing it one day. The thought of it won’t leave me
alone and it’s been years now. To many other books to read though, and time is
scarce!

~~~
AndrewStephens
I've read The Naked Lunch. The first 10-20 pages are an interesting window
into a different world, and the writing style really grabbed me. Then it gets
incredibly repetitive and boring. Don't feel bad about not finishing it.

------
furyofantares
There are a lot of nonfiction books where I expect the data would show me as
having abandoned it, but really I think the books are just too long.
Popularizations of scientific research fit this category very well -- halfway
into most of them I'm pretty convinced I've gotten everything out of them
already.

~~~
booleandilemma
That’s the way I felt when I read The Blind Watchmaker. I was thinking,
_alright, alright, I get it already..._

------
8bitsrule
Funny thing, reading books. There are many that I read at one time and
enjoyed. Today, I look at them again and wonder how I got through them. Would
I _still_ read _all_ of Godel, Escher, Bach? Ehhh... The clock keeps ticking.

That was before internet. It completely changed my reading habits. There was a
(surprisingly) huge backlog of non-fiction things I wanted to know more about.
Books about history, for example, were always a snooze; that changed when I
was able to pick the creator, exact era, topic and dosage. Reading about
places? Nah. Watching videos about them? Yes. How long will mortals enjoy such
powers?

A few living authors still have the power to pull me in just by publishing.
But one or two books I bought years ago are still waiting - pre-abandoned?

------
gamesbrainiac
I find myself reading a lot of fantasy, and I use GR to track the reading that
I do. I have to be honest, I find it really useful, especially if you are
undecided as to whether you want to purchase a particular book or not.

The negative reviews (1 or 2 star reviews) will often highlight the parts of
the book that the reviewer did not like, and that is often something that
determines whether or not I purchase the book or not.

------
slothtrop
I had actually abandoned the Glass Bead game, but enjoyed Demian and others. I
read half and didn't see it going anywhere interesting.

~~~
syndacks
I was so excited to read Glass Bead Game. I waited till the end, having read
most of Hesse's other major works before tackling his magnum opus. I was so
disappointed in it, and I too put it down. Part of me wonders if something was
lost in translation with that work.

~~~
zwieback
No, it's bad in German too. Millions of German high school students read the
other Hesse books but nobody finishes Glassperlenspiel.

------
theodorewiles
Wouldn’t the least abandoned books be more useful?

~~~
rossdavidh
If a book is almost never abandoned, that might only indicate that it is
short, or really easy, neither of which are hard to tell from a few seconds
inspection. This tells you something you might not otherwise know from a few
seconds' inspection.

~~~
bobbyi_settv
I imagine the least abandoned would be something that comes late in a series
(or at least from an author with many similar books), where basically everyone
who picks it up already knows that they will like it (those who don't were
filtered out by the earlier books).

------
ianai
Very cool application of math. Wish there were more than just the top 5. Maybe
a link to a page with more listings?

~~~
gwern
Here you go: [https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2020-01-05-goodreads-
book...](https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2020-01-05-goodreads-bookshelf-
abandoned-posteriorproportions.csv)

------
goatinaboat
This is unsurprising, the target audiences for Harry Potter and grim social
realism probably don’t overlap so much

~~~
vlunkr
I don't know about that, considering the success of Harry Potter the target
audience seems to be almost everyone.

~~~
lostgame
Eh - I’m not sure the type of intellectual who I’d guess is the target
audience for ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ or ‘The Three Body Problem’ are not the types
to be highly enthusiastic about Harry Potter.

Just like someone who is into some of the best/most intellectually challenging
Anime probably wouldn’t be all that impressed by The Simpsons.

~~~
vlunkr
Someone who appreciates the subtle, carefully crafted humor of the early
Simpsons wouldn't be interested in Anime. I can engage in silly media elitism
too.

My point is, you don't make something as successful as Harry Potter or the
Simpsons without making some smart decisions and appealing to at least a few
very intelligent people.

~~~
Noos
No, you can pretty much make successful things without that. The Da Vinci Code
sold 80 million copies, for example. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series sold 160
million copies over 11 books: James Patterson's Maximum Ride books sold 30
million over 8. Neither of the latter have had anywhere near the media blitz
Rowling has had. The goosebumps series in told sold a staggering 400 million
copies over its length.

Its frustrating because in general these big doorstopper books are usually
really bad at kid lit. Harry Potter honestly can't hold a candle to books like
Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey, or Barbary by Vonda MacIntyre. John
Christopher in particular wrote these tiny books that are just master classes
in economy; The White Mountains and The Lotos Caves stuck with me for decades.
William Sleator managed to do actual intelligent SF for kids, with even some
horror to it...something like Interstellar Pig is really surprising even as an
adult. Joan Aiken really is a wonderful author too.

Its just stuff like potter gets relentlessly pushed and snowballs a lot.
There's a lot more of the hive mind instinct that we think, at times.

------
syndacks
Somewhat orthogonal, I've never been so disappointed by a follow up work than
I have with Marlon James; from Brief History of Seven Killings to Black
Leopard Red Wolf (the most abandoned book on the "to" list). Seems I'm not
alone in this feeling!

~~~
jayroh
About a week ago I put down "Black Leopard Red Wolf" after a few hundred pages
and absolutely little desire to continue slogging through it. So when I saw
the book on this list and blog post mentioned often throughout - ha. I had to
chuckle.

As many others have said before, I'm sure there's an argument for it being an
objectively great book, but for me it just did absolutely nothing.

I learned a long time ago that there was no shame in stopping when you realize
you get no enjoyment from reading a book. I have no problem writing off that
sunk cost.

~~~
syndacks
Have you read BHo7K? If so, what did you think? If not -- read it!

------
hhmc
I think page/word count would have been an interesting covariate to
investigate.

------
ng12
Heartbroken to see "I Am A Cat" on there. Granted, it's probably too fanciful
for many (and a lot gets lost in translation) but Soseki is one author I'd
like to see get more attention in the West.

------
ptrik
The website itself is also interesting, with informative content and
minimalist aesthetics. The link previews on hover are particularly
interesting, similar to the Wikipedia one. What's the tech stack behind?

~~~
lordgrenville
The popups are really cool - I don't think I'd realised before that it's for
more than just Wikipedia. The Amazon previews are great.

I know nothing about design/typography, but I find it easier to read sites
that are more spaced out, use sans-serif fonts, and have colours. I think the
site looks beautiful (especially the drop caps!) but I wouldn't call it
minimalist.

------
mattkevan
Not surprised Space Opera was on the list. Hated it, and only finished it
because I was hoping that eventually the style would settle down and the book
would improve. It didn’t.

~~~
com2kid
IMHO Space Opera got way better as it went on.

The first 1/4th or even 1/3rd is just not good.

Once it gets to the actual aliens though, some amazing ideas. First time in
awhile I've felt that the aliens were really alien, some great ideas in there.

FWIW I listened to the audio book version, the reading of it was rather nice
and added to the humor.

~~~
mattkevan
Yeah that was why I stuck with it - there were some good ideas buried in
there.

I’m quite happy to endure thin characters, wooden dialogue and clunky prose
(hi Asimov and PKD) if the ideas are good. But the tone of this one was trying
too hard. Just wanted it to settle down and tell a decent story.

~~~
com2kid
The book is trying really hard to be the next Hitchhiker's Guide to The
Galaxy.

Trying a bit too hard at times.

I honestly think another few manuscript revisions, and a pass or two from a
brutal editor, and it might have ended up there.

But as it is.. parts of the book just aren't good. Which is sad because some
parts are great!

------
n_t
That website design is quite irritating. Reminds me of 1990s web pages, only
in monochrome.

~~~
Jenz
> That website design is quite irritating

How so?

------
andrewprock
This is a great lesson in "knowing your data" vs. "creating a model". The
validity of the generated model is tainted by the GIGO principle. Said another
way, modeling bad data will get you bad models.

I see this shockingly often in my professional life. A data scientist will
spend days, weeks, or months building a "perfect" model which replicates
unclean, biased, or bad data. And when they are done, it gets thrown away
because it cannot solve any real world problem.

