Against Curation: A Defense of Disorganized Reading
Why the algorithm's recommendations are the wrong books, and why serendipity remains the finest library science ever devised.
Every recommendation algorithm I have encountered gives me books I would have found anyway. They offer the literary equivalent of suggesting, after you order the lamb, that you might also enjoy beef. The system has modeled my preferences accurately enough to feel flattering and narrowly enough to be useless.
The books that have changed my thinking arrived by other means. A friend's recommendation made in passing about something else entirely. A footnote in a book I was reading for unrelated reasons. An author mentioned dismissively by someone I disagreed with — which, I have found, is often the best possible endorsement. A spine glimpsed sideways on the wrong shelf where I had been looking for something I never did find.
This is not nostalgia for the pre-algorithmic age. I am not arguing for randomness as a method. I am arguing for structured serendipity, which is different: the deliberate arrangement of conditions under which unexpected encounters become possible. A physical bookshop, organised by someone with opinions, is a serendipity engine. A library where the shelves hold the uncirculated alongside the circulating creates collisions the catalog cannot predict. A friend who reads differently than you do is a permanently running discovery mechanism.
The problem with curation is that it optimises for convergence. It gives you more of what you already want, refined and concentrated. But thought grows at the edges, in the gap between what you know and what you do not yet know you need. The algorithm, by design, cannot offer you that gap. It does not know what you do not know.
I have started keeping a list of books I was given for no particular reason and later found essential. It now runs to eleven titles. I have started keeping a second list of books I sought out deliberately after careful research. It runs to four. I do not think this is coincidence.
The recommendation I would make — and this is the only one I will offer — is: ask someone who reads differently than you do what they are reading. Then, without looking it up first, order it. The not-looking-it-up is important. The surprise is load-bearing.