Apex Books of Goodreads(timlabs.org)
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Apex Books of Goodreads
https://timlabs.org/goodreads/
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If anyone is wondering, one reason that Robinson Crusoe and The Mysteries of Udolpho are not "apex books" is that they are both dominated by the Iliad.
* The Iliad by Homer (-700) — 432,847 ratings — 3.90 average
* Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719) — 297,130 ratings — 3.68 average
* The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794) — 15,120 ratings — 3.40 average
The Iliad is older, has more ratings, and has a higher average rating than either of them. It therefore "dominates" them in the sense defined on the page.
(I am not questioning the merits of these works, just explaining why they are not on the list.)
If anyone is wondering, one reason that Robinson Crusoe and The Mysteries of Udolpho are not "apex books" is that they are both dominated by the Iliad.
* The Iliad by Homer (-700) — 432,847 ratings — 3.90 average
* Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719) — 297,130 ratings — 3.68 average
* The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794) — 15,120 ratings — 3.40 average
The Iliad is older, has more ratings, and has a higher average rating than either of them. It therefore "dominates" them in the sense defined on the page.
(I am not questioning the merits of these works, just explaining why they are not on the list.)
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.
Kind of sad.
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.