The paucity of good reviews and recommendations in fiction (and non)

I shop at Amazon. I shop almost exclusively at Amazon. I have been now since 1997. Every once in a while I go to a brick-and-mortar book stores because I'm out of books right now and can't wait for new books to arrive in the mail (and yes, I am a "Prime" member). But I find when I go to a b-n-m store, I pay more for the book, it's harder to find (how do you grep your way through a bookshelf?), and since my back is a wreck, I can't linger over prospective books, reading enough to know whether I want to buy them. This means I have "worse luck" at the physical bookstore than I do with Amazon.

Amazon also has a better selection (well, of course, right?). But they have more than that. They incorporate the used book sellers as well, so I can buy a U-2 flight operations manual (and have in fact done so), which I would never find at a b-n-m store, and would be very hard pressed to find at a used store (though, clearly, some used book store, somewhere, has flight manuals and the like, since I'm buying them...). I can even pick up an electronic copy of an AH-64 operator's manual. So, really, Amazon has a lot of stuff I really want and would have a hard time finding somewhere else.

But there's a downside to this. Amazon also knows what I like to read. Their algorithms are so "good" at this, in fact, that they seem incapable of showing me anything that I might be interested in reading, but don't know that myself. This is harder to explain than it should be. Basically, since Amazon knows I want to read books about ELINT and Radar and ECW, and that I also like Alastair Reynolds, Iain Banks, Ian McDonald, Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, and so on, that, because my purchasing history has included so many purchases by these authors on these subjects, that they never show me anything that's an edge case that might lead me to discover a new author – like Paolo Bacigalupi, who I really like, but didn't find out about on Amazon (I have since forgotten where I heard about him, but I know Toby Buckell was talking about him lots, and maybe Scalzi was too).

So, just using Amazon, I have a hard time finding an author that I know little about, like Jeff VanderMeer, who I (mostly) like. The linked book is one I found after almost two hours of weeding through books tangentially associated with books I liked ("7% of people who viewed this title bought X instead" or by going on what reviewers of books I liked had also read). But spending two hours to find a book that I read in just a couple days is not what I'd call efficient or effective. I read a whole stinking lot. I burn through, sometimes, a novel a day, and certainly at least one a week, and added to that are various nonfiction, non-novel, and technical books (I once did some pretty rigorous examination of what I read and how it's broken down, but it works out to an even split between fiction and non, with a smattering of periodicals and technical manuals thrown in; surprisingly, I spend as much as 41% of my time awake reading.) And this has caught up with me to the extent it is very hard for me to "break habits" (such as reading an author I've been reading for a long time. I am presently sick-and-fucking-tired of Stephen Baxter, but Amazon will tirelessly recommend him to me because I've bought so many of his books from them), or to make new ones.

There didn't seem to be any real solution to this. They are my sole bookseller, and they're the people with the "grep" function, and they're the people with more books than anyone else. But I needed books, and I knuckled under and decided to (gasp) manually peruse the books that Subterranean Press had in stock (their stock is small, specialized, expensive, and sells quick. They're a great press, and I've got a lot of special editions – signed, numbered, etc – from them, but they're not my primary source of fiction by any stretch). After going through what they had, I wound up spending $298 (with shipping) for only seven books. Granted, I know these are books I want, and they're very high quality books, and (maybe most importantly) I am supporting a very good press, but that is a lot of money to spend on words-on-paper. To top this off, when I was completing my order, I got a 500 error when I tried to finalize the order. I emailed them and told them their site screwed up, but I had no idea whether the order went through until I emailed them again (they, stupidly, don't have webmaster@ receiving email). Bill at Sub got back to me and told me my order had gone through, and was kind enough to send me a PDF receipt for the order so that I was sure my order had the right stuff in it, etc. This experience bugs me, though, because I don't trust a store that can't unfailingly process a simple credit card transaction. That's core to doing business, especially when you rely heavily on the Internet for your business.

The next step I took was kind of sneaky, looking back on it. I went to Amazon's UK site, which I order from far less frequently, and asked it for recommendations. Thankfully, while Amazon (US) has done a lot to "flatten" the two sites (making my account portable to both sites, including my shipping data, credit cards, etc), they haven't (yet) pushed over my reading habits. I think this would be hard for them to do because many of the books published in the US just don't have an equivalent in the UK because they're sometimes published under a different imprint, the content is different (books in the UK, generally, use British English, and when re-published in the US are converted to American English, and yes there is a difference!), and so on. I'd go as far as to say it would be disastrous for them to try. At any rate, by going to the UK site, I was surprised to see new authors. I also saw a few items which had been published by my "normal" authors which hadn't yet made it to US shores (I try to buy the UK imprints anyways because they're generally just better printed, and I prefer British English these days) – I avoided those. I was looking for something new, after all. So, thankfully, I was able to find six or seven books on Amazon UK by authors I had not yet read, but which were seemingly up my alley. I have high hopes. However, I paid $40 for the books (I bought paperbacks instead of my usual hardbacks), and another $40 for shipping and "packaging" (who are they kidding? packaging?). Thus bringing my total to $400 for a meager twelve (or maybe thirteen, I forget) books. Granted, I will enjoy them, and they're all of high quality, physically, but I cannot imagine it will keep me reading for more than a month or two. This is really unfortunate, and equates to a seriously expensive habit.

My alternative is e-books or spending a serious, serious amount of time researching new things to read. New authors. I tried, by going through the copious reviews of people like Peter Tilman (who is lucky enough to be part of the Vine program) to find something I might want to read. The problem is, I guess a lot of the reviewers, especially the really productive reviewers (those who have hundreds of reviews – I myself have only just over a hundred from over a decade of use), seem much more tolerant of reading drek than I am. They'll read the drek and write a review that says, well, the story was such-and-such and it's clear the author was influenced by so-and-so and this-or-that book, but it really was quite droll and the characters were thin, and I just didn't like it. (some of them will even slap a 3-plus star rating on a book with a review like that!) But, when I read this review, do I want to read that book? Of course not! So I went through lots of people who were very frequent reviewers, and found that by and large their reviews were useless to me because they'll review anything, and it's really hard to find the items they've reviewed that they really liked because they're so poor at using the ratings system to down-rate the drivel. I find this very frustrating. The review system should work to help me find a book I like. The Vine program in particular should be even better, and should be encouraging reviewers to make the review system itself better. But it's a wasteland. I don't think there's malfeasance (for example, I'm not saying that reviewers are making junk reviews just to satisfy their obligation to the Vine program), but Stuff's Not Working, and the consequence is it's really hard for me to find new books to read, those "edge cases" where I might not have sought the book out for myself, but would (could) be very interested. One of my favorite books in recent memory was The Dervish House, which was (partially; River of Gods was the reason I picked it up, but that was on a whim. I still haven't finished River, whereas I tore through Dervish House because it was so brilliant) an edge case.

One might think – I really wish – that Shelfari was better at recommendations and that their community generated – engendered even! – reviews, allowing me one to traipse through reviewers who have similar tastes to mine, who aren't afraid to completely pan a book that sucked, who are more interested in reading as a pastime – a serious one! – and want to do it properly. Shelfari just fails to deliver on that front, and it's sad. They could be doing more. They are, however, an Amazon asset (which I think was their goal all along, really), and they no longer need to aspire to be anything better than they are. They've succeeded in being what they needed to be to be purchased. And whether they wanted, from the beginning, to be a provider of blog widgets and sell-through revenue or not, that's what they're doing, not building a community.

My last resource, perhaps, is the blogging community. But I find myself at a loss for how to use the blogging community to find books that I (will) like. Because the community is so diverse, I can't just search through Blogger, I'd have to search through WordPress and TypePad and LJ (and probably Facebook, too)... and so on. And even if I figured out a good way to search through "the community" as a whole, how would I restrict it to just the items related to what they were reading? And, once I had figured that out, how would I further restrict that to things that I am interested in? The "relations" aren't there. There isn't a way for me to find people with similar (or similar enough) tastes and then look in to what they're reading.

It's a really thorny, unhappy quandary. I love reading, and it's becoming harder and harder to find new things I want to read. I'm in the same position with music, but frequently with music, I can enjoy a "product" (like an album) a lot longer than a novel. I don't often re-read books, but I found myself listening to Good News for People That Like Bad News today, which I hadn't listened to in ages. I enjoyed it.

I know I frequently suggest people reply or email me if they have suggestions, and I seem to get replies only when I've said something particularly inflammatory or been outright incorrect, and here I don't think I've done either. But, please, if you have a suggestion, let me know. Hell, even suggest books.

I do think I am in the market for an iPad – I'm going to wait to see if the rumored bump comes in April – and that means I will probably, grudgingly, start reading e-books. But I truly have a passion for the printed word, and I don't think I'll ever fully give up books. Besides, switching to e-books doesn't get me past the difficulty of finding what to read in the first place.

Perhaps I should get back to writing and spend more time writing instead of reading. Work has just been so evil to my soul lately, I am not feeling especially creative. I was thinking about fiddling with The Urban Circuit today (which I haven't really worked on in maybe a year), but after the motorcycles were stolen, it's hard to get in the mood. That, and the broken back. Argh.


edit: after writing this post, I toyed around with Shelfari some and found that its search matching was kind of fuzzy and strange. I started by searching for House of Leaves due to a discussion I was having with my wife. When it returned books that were definitely not House, I realized it was using some other matching algorithm than a direct match. While Shelfari's "readers like you" function (just showing me other people who have books on their shelf that I have on mine, but one at a time – do I really need to see other users who have a copy of Lord of the Flies but nothing else I have on my shelf? really?), the weirdness of their search function has enabled me to find another six books I'm interested in for a bit shy of $70. So, almost $500 now for right around twenty books. It certainly is an expensive habit. Ick. One would think that buying books would be cheaper than buying movies on blu-ray discs.