Apex Books of Goodreads

"What are the best books on Goodreads? ... those with the highest average rating. But in practice, this metric is skewed towards new books and books with few ratings."

The books in the "Apex" table with the highest score tend towards new as well. A few observations.

#1 is from 2005, Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

Now Watterson certainly deserves adulation, but above all the others over the past thousand years?

#2 is Brandon Sanderson's 2014 novel Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive, #2) from his "immersive fantasy epic" that I learned about reading this post.

There are only 8 entries from before the year Gutenberg first ruined a perfectly good wine press by spilling ink all over it. Nothing at all from the 18th century. Bypassing the 1700s titles that include Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Of course, the most obvious but expected bias is the inclusion of nearly no one outside of Western writers, writing in English. The exceptions are only in translation. Surely somewhere between the time of William Shakespeare and the time of Rebecca Yarros there must be worthy books in other languages and cultures, standing on their own in that milieu.

Keep in mind this sort of bias when evaluating the results of those Statistical Human Imitation Technology bots.

Bear in mind there are thousands of books a day released, most of them will never get on your search radar, or even get rated, so unless it goes viral somehow or you get a word of mouth recommendation, there could be millions of awesome books out there you will never see, and you will just keep getting the same shit recommendations from the same shitty algorithms.

Kind of sad.