Not just series, but I seem to mostly get a list of other books from the same authors.

The recommendations from other authors are good, but as far as I can tell I’ve read every single one of them.

Continuing to aggressively add everything it recommends eventually does seem to result in some interesting books I wasn’t familiar with, but I also end up with more and more books that are of zero interest to me.

For what it’s worth, I started with:

  Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace
  Europe Central William T. Vollmann
  Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon
  White Noise Don DeLillo
  One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez

It is possible that there simply aren’t many books like these in existence, so the pool of relevant recommendations gets exhausted fairly quickly. I’d guess trending towards unrelated popular books is also just a feature of the source data, that largely sums up my experience with goodreads anyway.

Very cool project though. I did end up ordering a couple of new books, so thank you very much.