Last Friday, on the New Yorker‘s excellent daily blog, The Book Bench, there was a brief post on Goodreads acquiring Discovereads, “a site that uses an algorithm to recommend books to people based on their preferences and on the preferences of users with similar tastes.” It sounds like a more mathematical version of Goodreads, a better “system” for selecting books. More from the New Yorker on this:

What I like about it is the updates I get telling me what my buddies are reading. The recommendations (and the ads) don’t matter so much to me, but if they are going to be there, I would like them to be the result of the best algorithmic cocktail known to mankind.

It all got me thinking about how book and movie recommendations work in the offline world. I have one buddy whose taste in movies I trust completely, because in twelve years of friendship he has never once failed me; and I have one buddy whose taste in books I trust completely, for a similar reason. Whatever algorithm God put inside these two people is the right algorithm for me … I wonder … about my dimwitted Netflix buddy and the new-and-improved Goodreads buddy I’m about to meet: Will they one day grow so good at reading my mind that they’ll be interchangeable with my real-life friends?

This is probably supposed to be funny, but this makes me feel a little cold. Ratings and lists are everywhere now. Overrated. Underrated. Top ten. Top five. Etc. Driven by the need for revenue, websites have gotten very good at trying to determine our preferences and giving us ads that we want. This is good: you get information relevant to you, the advertiser gets the audience it wants, costs are more efficient, we’re all happy. And we all get to participate. This is good. I guess.

Over on Ploughshares, the poets Weston Cutter and Bob Hicok (who we love!) discussed the word “random” and its use, often poorly, in workshops and the classroom. Cutter quotes cultural critic (and hoops fan) Chuck Klosterman:

People are answering questions not because they’re flattered by the attention but because they feel as if they deserve to be asked.

Which is sorta how I’m feeling about this rating system game that Amazon, Huffington Post, Facebook, ESPN, and every other company (frankly, some conversations with real live people, too) under the sun has decided to play. I’m not sure I really want my book choices, or others, fully automated, an algorithm. Even tongue in cheek, I don’t like thinking of my friend’s as a math formula (aren’t we all water? neurons? souls? I have no idea). Sure, it’s nice to have recommendations for a book. But I’m not sure I’ve ever read and loved a book that Amazon or Powell’s or whatever recommended to me because of my buying history. The books I love are not products. The recommendations of friends matter to me, at least in part, because they can be wrong. They can be intimate, vulnerable, widely off the mark. And that’s why it means so much.

Step back: it’s rare, but sometimes, a person I don’t know well has asked to read my work. This someone, whoever it is, cares enough to want to experience what I do and take my writing seriously. Phrases like “I write literary realism” or “I’m like Richard Yates, only I don’t make you want to kill yourself” don’t really do justice to my fiction. The best way to know what my stories are about is to, well, read my stories. Sure, I want readers. Who doesn’t?  But the anonymous reader is not the same as a person, probably a new acquaintance or friend, who I know on some personal level, asking to read my work. That’s a different connection and it is, in many ways, one of the most important things someone can ask of me.

Recommending a book to a friend is not, to me, a small gesture. It probably isn’t a small gesture to passionate readers either. Passing a book I love is one more thing in this world I don’t want to “outsource” to a company. I’d rather have someone showing me why he/she loves a book to mean something.  Really mean something.

Two friends have recently been kind enough to mail me books. It wasn’t so much the books that matter – though both were terrific – but that the books came from friends. These were small gifts, unsolicited, unexpected, and totally loved.

One of the books was South of the Big Four, the first novel by Don Kurtz. I was delighted to received a hardcover book, the dust jacket laminated; for a wonderful moment, I hoped my friend had actually stolen this from a library in some sort of maniac desire to share. Kurtz writes with a prose style that reminded me of William Maxwell, and even had the same qualities of isolation and buried loss. The narrator, Arthur, has returned home to live on his deceased father’s old farm, and begins to work for this new businessman/farmer, Gerry Maars. It’s a patient, moving, skillful novel of the farming community in the modern world. But it has extra meaning to me because of who it came from, and that it came with a handwritten letter tucked into the pages.

The other book is a chapbook published by Catenary Press: “Houses” by Elizabeth Benjamin. It’s a series of short stories that are loosely linked as images of people and place in various stages of movement and waiting, images that became clearer and stronger the more I reread it. One of my favorites followed a man walking through the woods, and stumbling into a hunter, who warns him to be more careful. After the hunter leaves him, the man follows by stepping in her footprints. And these stories, even with all their movement, have a strong sense of physical possession. I’d never have heard of it Benjamin without my friend mailing me the book, and this mailing too had a small personal note inside.

The letter/inscription combined with the slightly battered text that was read slowly, maybe even with some margin scrawls, pages stained by wine or coffee, rounded corners, cracked spines, all of which gets sent to me as something much greater than its individual parts: there’s no algorithm in this. Instead, there is something else, not so much a recommendation but a gift. And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review

Now that my own daughters are eight and five, and their attention spans have moved well beyond Goodnight Moon, we can read together, which, it turns out, is even better than sending my books home with other people’s children. Recently, I was scanning the bookshelves in the living room, trying to decide what we should read next. Should it be Ramona the Pest or A Wrinkle in Time? The Egypt Game? Something – anything – by Roald Dahl? Part of me knows we’ll get to them all eventually, but it’s harder to choose the right now book than one might think. Then I found it. A book that, when I read it as a child, made me realize that there were things people could do. Things children could do, that no one ever talks about, like running away and having adventures in a grown up world without anything terrible happening.

First published in 1967, E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is the story of Claudia Kincaid, and her younger brother Jamie, who run away from their suburban home and spend a week ducking guards, sleeping in enormous, antique beds and bathing in fountains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While they are there, Claudia and Jamie discover a mystery surrounding one of the museum’s latest acquisitions, a small angel statue that may or may not have been carved by Michelangelo. Their investigation eventually leads them to the slightly eccentric and elusive narrator of their story, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, who sold the piece to the museum.

What I remember most about the book from my first read – probably more than twenty years ago – was the feeling of awe that Claudia inspired in me. At eleven years old she is a planner. She thinks through every detail of their escape, from packing their clothes in their musical instrument cases, to how they will hide during those dangerous early morning hours when the museum staff have arrived, but the museum is not yet open. Claudia had a plan for everything.

Okay, I admit it; I still think Claudia’s pretty cool, and her compulsion to correct her brother’s grammar even when it could get them in trouble makes me smile every time. But as I’ve read it chapter-by-chapter to my girls this past week, what I really noticed is the subtlety with which Konigsburg reveals the inner lives of her characters. Claudia leaves home because she feels underappreciated, but through the novel she develops a complex relationship with her brother and learns not only what she’s capable of doing but in some way she also learns how to be herself. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t one of those children’s books with a terribly obvious lesson; I’ve never liked those. But I think that the reason it feels as fresh and remarkable now as it did when it won the Newbery Medal in 1968, is that learning how to be yourself is something that everyone has to figure out on their own, and it doesn’t get any easier.

Rereading this novel with my daughters is a way of not only sharing the books that I loved with them, but also of revisiting another kind of reading. There is a character in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler who has trained himself not to read. He explains that

It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them intensely, until they disappear.

I’ve worked so long and so hard at becoming a “better” reader, a more critical reader, that it’s easy to forget why I started doing it in the first place. How can you achieve that intensity, that level of absorption in a book that makes everything else disappear, when you’re trying to pay attention to so many different things? Reading once-loved books with my daughters is my way of unlearning – just for half an hour before bedtime – all the other ways of reading and reclaim reading for the love of reading.

The meaning of the suffix “-ate.”  Yes, that’s right.  Riding my magic bicycle at the perfect hour of the perfect day of the year, I was thinking not about love, not about vacations, not about the price of real estate, but about suffixes, particularly the one deriving from the Latin that means to cause to happen-expectorate, recreate, congregate, stimulate, cogitate, fornicate, mediate, associate–one could go on forever with the -ates.

What a wonderful thing the mind is.  It is as free flowing and unpredictable as the weather.  If a hundred experts sat in a room working hard for a week, they could never guess what I was thinking about on my ride.  Or if they did, they could certainly never guess both that and what I thought about next.  And to guess three successive thoughts?  No way, except with the help of Borges’s infinite library.

I think that’s why fiction and poetry are potentially more amazing than every other art form. It’s not a single moment, not a work of static art or of the awkwardness of moving pictures, powerful or not, but an unpredictable process of unfolding which a good story or poem can follow with the ease and naturalness of the miraculous weather of the mind.

Documentary
First place, $1,000: Lu Olkowski, “Grandpa”
First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Richard Paul, “Shakespeare in Black and White”
Second runner-up: Ken Cormier, “The Secret Pianos of Manhattan”
Third runner-up: Dan Collison, “Lord God Bird”

10-minute play
First place, $500: Kris Saknusemm: “Memory Wound”
First runner-up: George Zarr: Old Dog/Newer Tricks
Second runner-up: Sue Zizza, National Audio Theatre Festivals, “Avian Invasion”

Voice-only Literature
Creative Nonfiction
First place in Voice-only Literature category and Creative Nonfiction subcategory, $500: Albert Haley, “The Cough”
First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Lisa K. Buchanan, “All That I Missed”
Second runner-up: Randolph Jordan, “A Death in the Family”
Third runner-up: Angela Cervantes, “A House of Women”

Flash fiction
First place in subcategory and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Josh McDonald, “Lost”
First runner-up and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Jithendria Kumar Aravamudhan, “Memoirs of a Mad Man”

Poetry
First place in subcategory and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Todd Boss, “To Wind a Mechanical Toy”
First runner up: Todd Boss, “Yellow Rocket”
Second runner-up: Runner up: Susan B.A. Sommers-Willett, “The Golden Lesson”
Third runner-up: Eric Torgersen, “Taking Tickets”
Fourth runner-up: Josh McDonald, “Women in Strange Trousers”