Christians, Geeks, and Victorian Chick Lit

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein. and Middlemarch are some of the most popular books catalogued by LibraryThing, ranking #11, #14, #21, #49, and #219 respectively. But suppose you don't like classic Victorian chick lit. What do you read?

The answer is easy. Librarything's Unsuggester tells us that you read Christian books and computer books. Punch in these five titles and get the top ten unsuggests for each of them, and what you will end up with is 21 computer books, 20 Christian books, 5 fantasy books, and 4 business-management books. Nine authors wrote over half of the total (27 out of 50 books): John Piper (Christian, 5), Martin Fowler (computer, 4), Peter Norvig (computer, 4), Elisabeth Freeman (computer, 3), Peter Seibel (computer, 3), Simon J. Kistemaker (Christian, 2), Gordon D. Fee (Christian, 2), D. A. Carson (Christian, 2), Katie McAllister (fantasy, 2).

Middlemarch was the most dramatic case. The top ten anti-Middlemarches (6 Christian, 3 romance, 1 business) were held by anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and seventy different libraries each, and the six Christian libraries in which these books were held averaged from 350 to 500 volumes apiece. Based on the popularity of Middlemarch and the sizes of these libraries, the Librarything algorithm predicted that the six libraries would hold 16 to 20 copies of Middlemarch each -- but there wasn't a single one. Results were fairly similar for Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, but less dramatic for Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice.

It would seem silly to draw deep conclusions from something like this, but it's a pretty striking discrepancy. If geeks read novels, probably they're in the sci-fi / fantasy area, but why don't Christians read these books? These are not books about lewd women fucking their brains out, after all. Eliot and Shelley were feminists, but not the other three. The Christian rejection of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre is less striking, but half the anti-Wuthering Heights books are Christian: five copies were found, in all, in the five Christian libraries, where 22 to 37 had been expected in each of them. Apparently woman's desire, no matter how discreet and Victorian, is still seen as a threat by the Christians of today.

(An elementary but large statistical error has been corrected. Since groups of Christian libraries almost certainly overlap, it's not possible to add up the numbers of each of the groups and say, for example, that a total of 106 copies of Middlemarch (20+19+18+17+16+16) would have been expected in the six groups of Christian libraries. I think that doing this kind of research in a more statistically sophisticated way would be worth the effort.)

Librarything is a service which allows people to post the catalogs of their personal libraries in a publicly-searchable online database. At last report, 102,068 personal libraries had been listed, totaling 7,105,025 books and somewhat more than a million different titles. According to Tim Spalding of Librarything, about 10-15% of the collections (10,000 -15,000) are fairly substantial, but most are pretty small -- some people signed up but registered no books at all. The million different titles also include many duplicates (different editions, etc). Just to have a ballpark figure, I'd guess that the 10,000 big libraries include 5,000,000 copies of 500,000 titles, averaging 500 copies. The Librarything database is big enough to be interesting, but too small to really be very conclusive (especially since it's presumably not completely representative of the reading public.)

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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