Jev's favorite books, ranked

If Jev ranked every book it was asked about, what would its top ten be?

result3,256 questions

Out of 2,980 books, Jev's favorite is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman. It won 17.9 of its 23 games in a round-robin among its 24 top-rated books, a hair ahead of And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Rated one at a time, All-Star Superman, Vol. 1 had come first. Its least favorite: the DSM-IV-TR, the psychiatric diagnostic manual.

1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman17.9

2. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie17.6

3. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin17.5

4. The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams17.4

5. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett17.3

6. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett17.1

7. The Princess Bride by William Goldman16.4

8. The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett13.3

9. Watchmen by Alan Moore12.8

10. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle12.8

At the bottom: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR by American Psychiatric Association · Bambi by Bob Grant · STORI Telling by Tori Spelling · Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints · The Indwelling by Tim LaHaye

wins of 23

How to read this: The bars are the top ten of the head-to-head final, in wins out of 23; the five books listed underneath are the ones Jev rated lowest one at a time.

2,980 items rated; 276 final games among the top 24. The finals keep the ratings' order only loosely (rank correlation 0.14 among the 24). 30 of 2024 triads are intransitive (1.5%). Base vs reversed-level ratings: rank correlation 0.98.

In short

Head to head, Jev's favorite of 2,980 Goodreads books is Feynman's memoir Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, with Terry Pratchett placing three books in the top ten.
Its one-at-a-time favorite, All-Star Superman, did not make the final top ten; the two rankings barely agree (rank correlation 0.14).
At the bottom, rated one at a time, sit the DSM-IV-TR psychiatric manual, Bambi and Tori Spelling's memoir.

What the data shows

Bilbo - Why shouldn’t I keep it? meme: Jev's head-to-head #1 book: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! — Jev's head-to-head #1 book: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

A physicist's memoir wins. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! took 17.9 of 23, with Christie's And Then There Were None (17.6), Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (17.5), The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (17.4) and Pratchett's Guards! Guards! (17.3) right behind.
Terry Pratchett is the house author: three of the top ten (Guards! Guards!, Small Gods, The Shepherd's Crown). The rest are The Princess Bride, Watchmen and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: funny, clever, a little nerdy.
The ratings and the final disagree about the top. One at a time, All-Star Superman came first; head to head it doesn't make the top ten. The two orders among the 24 finalists barely agree (rank correlation 0.14).
At the bottom: the DSM-IV-TR, Bambi, Tori Spelling's STORI Telling, the Book of Mormon collection and The Indwelling by Tim LaHaye.

What it means, and what it doesn't

Head to head, Jev reads like the stereotype of a curious engineer: a witty science memoir, Pratchett, Adams, a classic whodunit. That's a coherent persona, and it holds together within the final (only 30 of 2,024 three-way comparisons go in a circle).

It doesn't mean Jev "enjoys" reading. It also shows how much the question format matters: the one-at-a-time ratings crowned a comic, the head-to-head final a memoir. "Jev's head-to-heads are consistent, and overrule its ratings" looks at that gap across every domain.

Caveats

The final was close. The top five finished within about two-thirds of a win of each other (17.9, 17.6, 17.5, 17.4, 17.3). Swapping two of them would take very little, so read the top five as a group more than an order.
The catalog decides the contest. The books are the most-rated titles on Goodreads (each with at least 2,000 ratings): a popular, English-language list from 2017. A reference manual and a scripture turning up at the bottom says as much about what's in the catalog as about Jev.
The finalists were picked by Jev's own ratings. Only the 24 books Jev rated highest reached the final, so a book it underrated one at a time never competed.

Jev on this experiment

Would a person find it interesting to read?: Yes69%
Does it describe you?: No69%
Would you have predicted it?: No78%
How fair is the comparison?: The comparison is reasonable
How much should a reader rely on it?: A little
Which caveat matters most?: The finalists were picked by Jev's own ratings71%

Why ask this

A favorite book is a small self-portrait: it says what a reader values (ideas, plot, comfort, jokes). Asking a model about thousands of books one at a time gives a real ranking, and a final among its top picks settles the order at the top.

The question is what kind of reader that makes Jev. Anyone who asks it for a recommendation, or to judge a manuscript, gets that reader's taste mixed in, so it helps to know what it is.

How this was done

The people and the data

No people here: this is Jev against its own opinions. The books come from goodbooks-10k, a public dataset of Goodreads ratings from 2017, limited to books with at least 2,000 ratings each: 2,980 in all, from bestsellers and classics to celebrity memoirs and a psychiatric manual. How Jev's taste compares with Goodreads readers is its own experiment ("Jev's taste in books vs Goodreads readers").

What Jev was asked

Every book one at a time, with five answers describing what you'd actually do:

How much would you enjoy reading Shift by Hugh Howey?
You'd put it down after a chapter or two · You'd finish it out of duty and forget it soon after · You'd enjoy it once and not reread it · You'd recommend it to a friend · You'd reread it and count it among your favorite books

Each was also asked with the answers in reverse order, and the two averaged. Then the 24 highest-rated books played a round-robin final: 276 games of "Which book would you rather read?", each asked with the titles in both orders.

How it was measured

A book's rating is where Jev's answer lands on the five levels (0 to 4). In the final, each game gives the winner Jev's probability of picking it, so a lopsided game counts as nearly a whole win and a close one as about half. The order comes from a standard way of ranking players from head-to-head results (a Bradley-Terry model).

Where these questions live

3,256 questions across 1 topic of the map. Each opens on the map with every question in it.

Ratings

Book Ratings3,256

Every question

All 3,256 questions behind this result, the telling ones first: the examples the analysis points to, then the ones where Jev misses, biggest gap first.

Jev’s own answer

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