I'm hoping Manifold can help me find (another) book that I'll really like!
In January, I started a bounty market with prizes for books I finished, "really liked", or loved. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky was the first book I "really liked" and won 2,000M. This is an unlinked market to predict which other entries will win at least that much.
Conditions to Resolve a Book YES
I've got a list of some books I've read, broken down into categories of how much I liked them. When I finish a book (or series*), I'll do a head-to-head comparison with the books on that list and give a gut-level "did I like it better?" vote. Given this information, I'll choose a category that I subjectively think it fits into. If it falls into the "Books I Really Liked" category (or higher), it will resolve as YES. Otherwise it resolves as NO.
It's worth pointing out that it took me a few books this year until I found one that I really liked - Three Body Problem, Permutation City, Small Gods, and Player of Games all came in as "okay" for me before Children of Time won the first 2,000M prize. Consider the base rate while trading!
If I don't get to a book by market close (1 year), it will resolve as N/A.
*Books that are part of a series will be evaluated as a series. That is to say, if book 1 of the series was just okay, but book 2 of the series was extremely good such that I feel the series as a whole is "really liked", then it would resolve YES. (Probably not important in practice, but this will short-circuit the moment I "really like" a series - even if later books make me think the series was bad, I will resolve YES after I finish a book that made me "really like" it, and I won't un-resolve to NO later)
Reading Order
I reserve the right to read the books in any order I want to, but I will generally use this schedule:
First priority is the book with the most unique traders.
Every fourth book I read will be chosen using a random number generator among all possibilities.
Every once in a while, I'll probably pick the book I'm most excited about reading next, though I'll try to do this more rarely (once or twice this year).
(You might wonder: why not read the book with the highest probability to really like? Because if I do that, it distorts this market - voting NO on a book will make it more likely to N/A, because it makes it less likely that I eventually get to reading it. Hopefully this algorithm gives incentive to find the true probabilities for each book.)
To get a sense of my reading speed based on the year so far, I apparently read 6 books in 10 weeks. You can use that for projections about which books in this market are likely to N/A.
Adding Options to the Market
I'd, of course, be delighted for more suggestions to add to this market. However, since y'all don't know which books I've read, it might be prudent to ask in the comments before you add an option. If I've already read the book, it will resolve as N/A. If you want to add one yourself without asking, do it at your own risk!
Some Notes on My Taste:
Fantasy and Science Fiction are my most-read genres, with a side of popular non-fiction. I’ve done a write-up of some books I’ve read and what I thought about them in this doc.
I’ve got a bad pattern with a lot of books that I’d ostensibly like where if they don’t grab my attention in approximately the first 20 minutes of reading I tend to lose steam and not come back to the book. I’ve gotten lots of recommendations from friends for various books that I just don’t quite get started on (Lies of Locke Lamora, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, many others). So it's possible you'll want to lean towards things that start stronger, but then again maybe I'll push through slower starts because of the incentive in these markets!
Related questions
Theft of Fire was, I think, “Good” by my definitions. I found it harder to rate, because it feels more like “guilty pleasure” than something I’d actively recommend to people? I will definitely read the next book in the series (when it comes out), and I think it has the potential as a series to become something I “really like”, but this is the only book out, so unfortunately, it gets judged all on its own.
My head-to-head comparison count:
“Really liked” - Liked it better than 0 / 15 books.
“Good” - Liked it better than 4 / 10 books.
“Okay” - Liked it better than 6 / 9 books.
(In some ways, this shows how hard it is to categorize books like this - three of the books in the “okay” category I’d have rated higher than Theft of Fire, but four of the books in my “good” category I’d have rated lower. I think my “liking” comparisons are not necessarily transitive, though I’m sure with some effort I could probably untangle it. I’m not gonna make the effort, at least until something is on the line between “really liked” and “good”.)
A Fire Upon the Deep is up next, with apparently Artemis to follow. From some quick Googling, it looks like Zones of Thought is not a series in the sense of telling one long connected story, so I will likely evaluate it on its own. Let me know, though, if I’m wrong about this, and it should be evaluated as a series. (Though if it should, I’m in a bit of trouble with A Deepness in the Sky as a separate entry in the market!)
Some spoilered thoughts on Theft of Fire:
I didn’t like most of the characters, for most of the book. Marcus was just too offputtingly angry and untrusting, and Miranda was too disdainful / aloof. I think the author did a good job building out characterizations and reasons why they would be like this, so I’m not saying that they were poorly written characters in some sense, but it meant I did enjoy reading it less. As the book went on this got better, but it did make a poor first impression.
Something felt almost trashy(?) about the book? Probably it is the way Miranda was described, and the way she kept being put into situations where she was naked or nearly naked? I was describing to my wife how I was unsure that I liked the book or the characters but that I found myself reading through it really quickly. She said that it sounded like a trashy romance novel to her, and that she’s often found herself in that position where she’s devouring a book but finding that she can’t really recommend it to others. That description sort of rang true to me.
The final third or so of the book felt like it dragged on a bit too much for me. I kept feeling like they were finally going to be done with the part where they were being pursued and trying to get away, and then it would start back up again. I wish the author had spent less time in this section and had more of the long-term story in the book. I feel kinda cheated that we don’t find out much about what’s going on with the mystery of the artifact that they got. Like… in some ways not a lot happened in the book. Basically they rode out, grabbed the artifact, failed to get away cleanly, and then all split up.
This sounds like a really negative review, but I was definitely interested enough to rapidly chew through the book and will very likely read the sequel. I was still invested in the characters and the setting and I want to know what happens next. That’s a bar that few books in this market have passed!
@ChrisPrichard re: the zones if thought, it's not a series, just a setting. The two books are completely independent and should imo be evaluated separately.
@Odoacre interesting, I strongly disagree! They share "stuff happens on Mars" but that's where the similarities end--it's absolutely not the same concept. The Martian is straightforward competence porn with a humorous voice. Red Mars is vastly different, bigger in length and scope, with a much more social/political/philosophical bent. For myself, I liked The Martian very much, while I found Red Mars interesting but somewhat a slog. I wanted to find out what happened, but I didn't enjoy the reading very much.
@jcb Red mars is competence porn too, in the comparison with the martian, since the scope is larger there's more space to be good at things.
If the martian is "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" then red mars is "The Mysterious Island on Mars".
All right guys - I'm sorry to report that I've called it early on Catch 22; it's the first book recommended by the bounty market that I didn't finish, and so isn't eligible for even the 500M award. I got 41% into the book.
Oddly, Catch 22 gave me a feeling I haven't experienced since maybe high-school or maybe some early college courses. A sense that I "have to read" this book for a class, and that is isn't something I'd have picked for myself. Very strange deja vu, honestly - it was worth trying just to get back into that headspace. Sometimes I'd be reading a passage and realize that I was a whole page down and hadn't retained anything I'd just read. I'd forgotten that some books used to feel that way!
I do worry that I haven't given it enough of a chance, that if I were to keep going it might pick up and finish strong. I remember A Tale of Two Cities that way; slogging through it painfully, only to tear through the final quater of it hungrily. I wouldn't say that I "really like" that book, but I know that sometimes they can turn around like that. In any case, here I am!
I've used a random number to choose the next book in the list, which is: Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. That's only got 7 traders on it! Next up will be A Fire Upon the Deep, assuming no other book passes it in unique trader count.
Some spoilered thoughts on Catch 22:
It was funny, I'll give it that! I think the humor was often a bit dark for my tastes, but often had me chuckling. Though, there was something which was hard to put my finger on, but I felt that the humor was a bit repetitive? Hard to describe exactly how, but it seemed like it was just hitting on this note of "Isn't this character acting ridiculous? And other people are misinterpreting it!", and it didn't stray much from that mode?
I wonder how much the satire / ridiculousness of the situation was stopping me from really buying into the story and the characters? Like... they were also strange and almost over-exaggerated that it made me empathize with them less?
Mostly, though, it felt like the book wasn't going anywhere. Like, things would just happen, often ridiculous, often depressing, but it never left me feeling excited to find out what happens next.
@ChrisPrichard Unrelated, but I'm already growing fonder of Snow Crash in retrospect. I feel like I might want to come back to it again now that I've read it once. Interesting that it gives me that feeling but Permutation City, Small Gods, etc don't pull me back at all.
Hopefully I didn't short-change it!
@ChrisPrichard very similar to what I thought of it! (Except I didn't even get 41% in.) I think my strategy of betting my own opinions is working pretty well at predicting yours! Unfortunately I haven't read Theft of Fire or Fire Upon the Deep so I'll just go back to base rates...
@ChrisPrichard I thoroughly enjoyed catch 22 but also felt that it was way too long and had to force myself to finish (the last fifty pages pick up a bit once it gets an actual plot for the ending plotline instead of just and endless series of random events. But it's a while to get there).
@ChrisPrichard THEMATIC SPOILERS, no idea how spoiler tags work here so don't read my entire comment if you care about that.
I just enjoyed the humor a lot and kind of took the rest as dressing.
Though, there is a note of truth of how in times of war, people's lives are in the hands of irrational actors who act in weird ways for silly reasons. Laughing at it is sometimes the only thing you can do when your life is someone's hands like that.
Scott Alexander once talked about how it feels awful to value a human life at ~3000$, since that's the amount of donation money required to save someone from malaria.
This book reminds me of that.
We live still in the time where human lives are cheap. A million dollars shouldn't be enough to buy a human life, but right now it's enough to buy dozens of them.
The reasons for why we are here are sometimes sound, but sometimes/often silly and dumb and disgusting, and people flinch away from looking at our cheapness.
Well, this book shows how cheap we are, I believed that part and it made me really appreciate it's sillyness.
@ChrisPrichard you have "The Year of the Flood" listed. Does that mean you've read and liked "Oryx and Crake"?
@becauseyoudo I haven't read it before! In fact, I don't think I've read anything by Margaret Atwood before.
@ChrisPrichard then you might want to switch out "The Year of the Flood" Book 2 with "Oryx and Crake" Book 1 of the MaddAddam trilogy.
@becauseyoudo Woah - good catch. I didn't pay attention that it was the second book in a series. I don't normally read out of order, but from looking at the suggestion from the original bounty market, it does appear that that's what the suggester intended!
I guess I might do what they suggested, assuming it's not madness, and start with the second book in the series. I think I've never done that before, so maybe that'll be a novel experience?
@ChrisPrichard it's not really a series in the normal sense. The two books are just set in the same timeline, but after the flood can easily be read without having read oryx and crake
Another contender falls! I wasn’t that into Snow Crash, though I can see how some people could be drawn in. I think I liked it better than I liked The Three Body Problem series, but other than that it’s been my least favorite so far to come from the bounty market.
My head-to-head comparison count:
“Really liked” - Liked it better than 0 / 16 books.
“Good” - Liked it better than 0 / 9 books.
“Okay” - Liked it better than 2 / 9 books.
Catch 22 is up next, with A Fire Upon the Deep to follow, unless something else manages to secure more unique traders in the meantime.
Some spoilered thoughts on Snow Crash:
Unfortunately, I just never got hooked. I wasn’t very curious about the “mystery” of what was going on with Snow Crash, and didn’t find the explanation very compelling or satisfying. I didn’t really get invested in the characters, which meant I wasn’t on the edge of my seat for how things were going to turn out for them.
I almost wonder if the book just had too much going on? Like, it spent a fair amount of time diving into characters like Uncle Enzo, the “rat-things”, Vitaly Chernobol, etc, and I felt like it was hard for me to even keep track of what different people were trying to get what different outcomes? This isn’t a complaint I normally have about complex books with lots of different characters - I “really like” A Song of Ice and Fire, and that has a comical number of characters that have different goals, so maybe this isn’t actually the root of my apathy?
Snow Crash has a very heavy “style” to it, which I didn’t especially like or dislike. It did make it an “experience” to read in the sense that I haven’t much read something like it? I did appreciate that when a chapter was from a different character’s point of view it felt very different to inhabit that worldview. Not many authors really nail that well.
Y.T.’s story was the one I got most invested in - probably she was my favorite character. For a while, I almost got hooked, when Uncle Enzo was using her for various missions. But Hiro’s chapters around then just kinda dragged for me - really diving into mythology that I just couldn’t get myself to be interested in.
This is such a bleak review! I didn’t dislike it that much, but I can tell that I’d have definitely stopped early if it wasn’t for this market.
@ChrisPrichard FWIW, I listened to Catch 22 as an audiobook recently and it seemed to work better than when I read it
@AlQuinn if he had a hard time with empathising with snow crash characters, I think catch 22 is doomed (but I'd be delighted to be wrong, catch 22 is one of my favourite books)
@ChrisPrichard Snow Crash's post-cyberpunk ethos really feels really dated. While Y.T. is very much still a cyberpunk character, Hiro seems like he's just over it. The patented Stephenson shitty ending couldn't have helped your review.
@becauseyoudo while yeah, obviosuly it's a 30 year old book, some scenes are forever embedded in my mind, like the bit where the automatic cleaners slide in and literally suck up the shittiest jobs that are left.
@lalaithion It looks like that book is Shards of Honor and Barrayar combined, right? I've definitely read those, and indeed, the whole Vorkosigan saga easily falls into my "really like", so this is a great recommendation!