How Much Does Genre Matter to Readers?

This Friday, see what critics are calling a cold-blooded masterpiece. Hello, pretty. You're dead. Dead is just a word. Did you think our story was over? Discover the secret. You brought us here for a reason. Behind the mask. What do you think happens when you die? It's time to find out. Ethan Hawke. I'm not afraid of you. You should be. The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot, and we're here to help bring the excitement with decor for every part of your home.

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And we're here. We just crowned Professor Laura McGrath, assistant professor at Temple University, our official data correspondent. And she smiled, Laura, so I assume you accept. Accepted, yes. And you are here to bombard, pepper, entertain, bewitch, bewilder us with stats. Is that right? Do I have my head screwed on right what we're doing today?

Yeah, a little less statistics today and more head exploding paradigm shifts. Yeah, Laura sent me this email a couple weeks ago that was like, I have been reading things and these things are weird and they are exciting. And would you like me to come talk about? them and I've never answered an email so fast. Laura, before you tell us the actual things, what do you mean you've been reading things? From what depths have these things arrived? Well, I am...

a scholar of contemporary literature. My research is focused on the contemporary publishing industry and I use a very weird idiosyncratic bespoke I guess, collection of methods to do that sort of work, which means I spend a lot of time reading in cultural sociology.

sociology of literature. I also spend a whole lot of time talking to people in publishing. I also get really dusty in archives, looking through correspondence, things like that. So this reading that we'll talk about comes from the nexus of cultural sociology uh and um digital humanities so thinking about data and literature together cool it's very exciting stuff for us Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. All right. Laura, where would you like to begin? Okay.

So I wanted to start. I think it's useful to kind of get our priors on the table. I believe that this is a sort of mind blowing paradigm shift. But because these are often unspoken assumptions, we can lose. of how much of a shift is going on because these things tend to feel very natural. So I want to get our priors on the table so that way we can come back to them at the end of the episode and see how much ground we have covered.

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kc.org so make sure to check it out and thanks again to the rabbit hole for sponsoring this episode So I wanted to ask the two of you, first of all, as readers, what is your relationship with genre when it comes to selecting a book to read? And here, like, I recognize that you are professional readers. And so this is kind of a stacked deck. But if you were choosing something to read for fun, you're on vacation, no one is making you do this, what are you going to pick?

And how does genre influence your selection of a book? I guess I'll go first. I am not much of a genre reader, as listeners of the show know. I will dip my toe into like the occasional thriller or the occasional romance or something that bubbles up because it's like really popular and people say it's good.

God of the Woods last year is a great example of that. Like I'm not reading a bunch of thrillers, but everybody loved God of the Woods and I trusted the chorus on that one. So yeah, I tend to... reach for things on vacation that are pretty similar to things that listeners hear me talk about here. Literary fiction.

middle brow to serious nonfiction. I love a memoir, pop science, that kind of thing. But in terms of what we think about as genre fiction, I would say I am very casual. Not much sci-fi is happening. with me.

And one of the glories of the way that we do this show is that nobody tells us what we have to read. So we tend to read the things for the show that we are already interested in. So I'm actually not that sure that my reading would change much in a world where I wasn't doing this job. I would just be less anchored. to publication date. I'd be reading like older literary fiction works rather than what's coming out in the next two weeks.

I think I'd still be pretty mostly literary fiction. But of course, a lot of literary fiction is getting a genre bend these days. And I'm into that. You've just like teased everything we're going to talk about, Rebecca. This is great. Would you, before we hear from Jeff, would you describe yourself as an eclectic reader? Like, is that phrase that you would use? Okay. Yeah. I would say I'm an eclectic reader. I'm open to just about anything. Okay. Jeff. Let's.

Let's do a little what we talk about when we talk about genre. We're doing romance, sci-fi fantasy, mystery thriller, horror. nonfiction i assume in this context is not a genre even though we sort of use it as a genre sometimes on the show what about like historical fiction which is increasingly both a genre and just commercial crossover whatever like

Am I in the ballpark, Laura, about how you're understanding genre? Yeah, yeah. It's less about a specific and more like, you know, you're walking through Powell's, you see a cover that strikes you as interesting. Are you inclined to say, I don't know, I was really in the mood for a romance. I think I'm going to let this one. It's not. So this is like, what section of the bookstore do you shop in? Almost zero, almost zero of that for me. Like I really am an open target.

for whatever i mean i think i know enough about packaging and marketing now And I don't know that most readers are like this, so I can't even metacognition my way out of this. I know what a genre of mystery looks like. I know what a genre of romance looks like. I know what a genre of sci-fi fantasy books looks like. So I'm going to sort of just...

I'm not going to dismiss them out of hand, but my eye is not going to fall on them. I'm going to fall on something that, what is that? I'm not sure. Have I heard of the author? Do I look at it and think it sounds interesting? Do I read the first couple of pages? Does it strike me at all? I would say almost zero impact of genre, except for maybe like category avoidance. If that's straight down the middle genre and I can tell, I'm not going to pick it up.

Interesting. Okay. And then same question for you, Jeff. Would you characterize yourself as an eclectic reader? If I am not, I don't know who is. Let's put it that way. That seems very fair. Okay, and do you two, do you think that you are typical readers? No. We're big weirdos. If there are only 20,000 people reading literary fiction, as those essays would have us believe we're two of them.

Well, I guess I'll put it this way. I mean, is the question you're asking, do we think most other people consider themselves eclectic readers? Because I think we're eclectic, but also unusual in the nature of our eclecticism. Like we just know too much.

We can see the matrix a little bit. Yeah, that is hard. You can't unsee it. You can't unsee a cover that is very clearly a book blob cover that is signaling certain things to you about what's happening inside. No, I suppose what I'm asking is, do you think that... people tend to read according to genre do you think that tends to structure a lot of readers approach to reading yes the civil like the civilians in my life yeah their reading seems much more structured around a genre or

increasingly around particular tropes within a genre. I guess my sense, Laura, is that I agree with Rebecca saying, I think there are veins of that readership that are very deep, but I actually think there may be more narrow. Like the people that only read one genre, they may read hundreds of books in a year.

But I think in terms of a Memedian reader, I think like everyone says they're middle class. I think a lot of people are going to say they're eclectic readers. Even if they actually don't shows up in their actual reading, I think they're going to say they're eclectic. That's my guess. I have a question about this. Do we think that there's like... book nerd cultural capital to be found in saying you're eclectic? Oh, like saying you watch more NPR than you do, Rebecca? Right. Yeah.

There's a norm core aspect. Yeah. It's a good question. I don't know. My first blush is I'm not sure if eclectic is where people would think there's cool points to be scored. I guess I'm thinking about people who like. If you ask them their favorite kinds of music and they say, oh, I listen to everything like that's.

Very rarely true, but they're trying to signal that they are open to a bunch of different kinds of things. And like, I'm one of those people. I will say I listen to everything, but that's not like I don't have an EDM playlist, but there's a bunch of variety that's not EDM. bossa nova cuts are pretty shallow right so i i don't know i wonder like that's interesting maybe this is maybe outside the scope but i'm really interested in like what is motivating people to identify as eclectic or not

So are you going to hit us with what percentage of people say they read eclectically, Laura? Is that where we're going here? Is that where we're headed? We'll get to a version of that. Okay. Yes. But I don't think I can tell you precisely, but we'll get to a version.

But we're backing up genuinely exactly where Rebecca left off, which is classical music. So there's a really influential strand of sociological research that's been active for about the past 30 years that has... revolved around what is called the omnivore hypothesis. Are you all familiar with the omnivore hypothesis? Okay. We saw this. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Are you thinking Omnivore's Dilemma, different thing? No, we saw something, Rebecca, and I don't know where it was. Maybe it was with you, Laura, that brought it up, that people who read books also read or also watch TV and also watch movies. So there's a certain kind of cultural consumer that will...

not only hop genre theoretically, but hop format. Like if you're going to consume, you're going to like, I think Rebecca, you and I are probably like this. We'll go. Yeah, no, that's right. And it did watch a documentary.

Laura talked about that with us when she was on the show back in, it was like late spring or early summer. So listeners, if you missed that episode, you can scroll back and it's like five mind blowing stats about the reading. Is that the omnivore thing we're talking about here, Laura? It kind of is. Although that.

study did not engage in this kind of robust literature around the omnivore hypothesis. So the sociologist Richard Peterson comes up with the omnivore hypothesis looking at listeners of classical music. So traditionally, the way that we've thought about taste in cultural sociology is the division between high and low and the middle brow.

So you can map this out on like the characters of Frasier, right? In terms of how they are defining and thinking about their own cultural capital in regard to taste. There's Niles, who's the highbrow brother. There's the dad, Marty, who's like cracking the...

is the very lowbrow situation. And then there's Frasier, who's kind of the classically middlebrow with his radio show. And that's the biggest insult that Niles could possibly level at him, that he's the middlebrow taste. But that's what he's kind of negotiating. He would not admit that. about himself, but he is.

what peterson finds in 1992 about classical music is in fact people are much more like rebecca that rather than uh these cultural connoisseurs about music being only invested in classical music and really reinforcing this high-low divide, he finds that connoisseurs of classical music love music, just period. They love music of all sorts, of all varieties. They are just as inclined to listen to Bach as to the Beatles, as to Billy...

as to bleachers. I love this. Rather than this kind of stark divide of like, oh, no, no, no, I don't do Taylor Swift or I absolutely don't do Carly Rae Jepsen. But in fact, loving music means loving all kinds of music. And that is the general omnivore hypothesis, that people are more invested as cultural consumers in whatever particular media form that they're in, rather than stuck in this high-low divide any longer.

So applied to readers, this would be, I love books. I love all kinds of books. Sometimes I read the Is She Guru Nobel Prize winning novel and sometimes I pick up a romance. Yes. Yep. But what's really interesting is that it's taken about 30 years for any of this research to extend to books.

um the the omnivore hypothesis is kind of stuck in other cultural spheres and and people sociologists have talked about it in two ways so one is what we were talking about before that if you like one sort of media you're probably going to hop media Right. So if you really like classical music, that means that you probably are also someone who is going to the opera or to local theater or who is going to your art museum or who is donating to NPR. And here you can hear the choices that I make.

about cultural capital and the sorts of media forms that I'm choosing, right? There's a kind of a highbrow approach to being an omnivore. Or there's the other hypothesis, which is the one you just mentioned, Rebecca, which is I read everything or I engage with everything. So I love classical music, but then I also love Taylor Swift. Everything kind of in that vertical space.

of cultural engagement so that's dividing the high and low within a particular media um and that's been the debate the debate has been going on it's been this huge active uh space of scholarly research and has weirdly i think very weirdly not extended to books up until now why do you think that is laura do you think the book people are even more resistant i mean you would think if there's any niles crane

era, it would be classical music. If it's true for classical music, it seems like it would be true for anything. That seems the ivoriest of ivory tower when it comes to cultural consumption, to me at least, like classical music. Mozart seems way more... It seems way less approachable even than like Dostoevsky on the books.

point of view. It seems like more of the people I know, when Rebecca and I talk to people who want to read the classics, they're much more interested in... Dostoevsky seems like it sits alongside Sally Rooney much more than Mozart sits alongside... I don't know, somber or whoever's on top 40 right now.

Yeah, I think so that the long debate around taste and sociology has to do with the relationship between cultural products and cultural class. So Max Weber would say that there is no necessary relationship between cultural products.

and cultural class. Post Bourdieu, we would think instead that there is, in fact, a really tight relationship between cultural product and cultural class. So what that means is you tend to read Dostoyevsky if you are better educated, if you are... also wealthy and white, but not necessarily, right, if you are taking a Weberian perspective, which is to say, you know, cultural products are not necessarily following on cultural class.

I think books have kind of always been treated as a sort of rarefied high cultural space. And so I think perhaps there has been some slowness to approach books because they're kind of. often associated with the intelligentsia in ways that perhaps other media forms are not. But I also think that it's because it is really, really hard to get any good data on readers.

And that's been the real impasse to doing that. And that is where our heroes for today, professors James English and J.D. Porter of the University of Pennsylvania, have something new to teach us about readership. data and how the omnivore hypothesis translates to books. Hell of a pitch, Laura McGrath. I also just have deep fondness for James English and J.D. Porter. Wait, did I just call him Jim? Jim English. That's his name. J.D. Porter. Jimmy! J-Bone!

So I also love talking about this research because I just, I enjoy nerding out with these guys among, among others, actually more than most people.

So before we get into that, I'm curious to return to the priors that I asked you that we started with, which is to say, to what degree do you think that the publishing industry thinks about genre as a primary? So much. Jeff, you take this one. So this is one where maybe I have a, it could be super interesting and reflective or.

Because of the rooms I'm in talking to advertisers, this is my data set. When I'm in New York taking meetings with advertisers, one of the reasons that BookRite has the product lineup we have is because how much... advertisers, marketers want to put a science fiction fantasy title in a science fiction fantasy newsletter podcast, you know, sponsored content, something else like that. I will say.

this is some hot data for you, Laura, is that when we see the click-through rates on banner ads, we used to show science fiction fantasy banner ads against science fiction fantasy content on the site. I maybe tipped my hand when I say used to. We didn't see any difference in performance when those same banner ads were put sort of against general content, not filtered by genre.

So this is something we say, like, you know, we see, and now is a book riot reader typical? I don't know, except the behavior across book riot readers has been. The ads sort of perform similarly, whether it's a targeted quote-unquote ad or not. But we do know one reason we have a librarian's newsletter, a horror newsletter, is because they want to market to librarians. They want to market to people who have signed up for a horror newsletter.

we don't see that much difference in performance. So my prior here is that advertisers and publishers really care where readers really don't. And Rebecca, that sort of is where we've been for 10, 15 years at this point. Yeah. I totally agree with that. I think publishers really care about genre. They...

So my like armchair psychology reading of what's happening there is they see the couple of things each year that hit really big and they extrapolate that is from this genre. And so we should make more of that genre and we should advertise more of that genre.

to the people who read the first big book in that genre and that sort of attempt to like capture lightning in a bottle multiple times, which we're currently seeing with romanticy. I think... public and also this is how imprints function like an imprint is generally built around a particular right a particular genre or a particular type or flavor

of book and so they're spending all of their time publishing science fiction and they're trying to reach the people who read science fiction but i think they underestimate the degree to which a general reader is also maybe interested in, in my example, science fiction. It's not just your hardcore sci-fi fans. It's maybe the whole universe of people who read books that if you presented that book to them the right way.

Some percentage of them are also going to opt in whether they've read a sci-fi book in the last 10 years or not. That could be the one they go for. So I think publishers overweight it significantly. Yeah, and that's really consistent with my research.

is coming out in april it's on literary agents and one of the things that i found through the 10 years of interviews i've done with agents is how much they specialize by genre as well So even before we get to advertising, before we get to imprints, we've got authors that are submitting their work according to people who are working in.

Comp's. It's the comp industry. I mean, that's, that's where it all starts, right? My book is gone girl meets the Da Vinci code would read by the way, but like that's how they would do that thing. And, and I think the weird by-product of that is every time there's a huge blockbuster book.

Everyone's surprised because it's not the genre people were buying. Like Gone Girl's a huge surprise. Da Vinci Code's a huge surprise. Romanticist is a surprise. It's all a surprise because they were thinking that... The hard thing about culture writ large is you can't predict what's going to happen next, but you're always, you know, so you're using these strategies to get a genre book published when the forces that make where the crawdad's seeing a hit are unrepeatable.

and frankly a little bit unknowable. So all they have to go back on is genre and category. And this is my contention. I am not editorializing and I don't know if Porter and English would agree with me.

But my contention coming away from their research is that at least in publishing, we talk about how unpredictable it is and how... little we know about readers i i think we're doing this wrong by by approaching this through genre like i don't think that most readers are approaching the world via genre primarily um i think that most readers are approaching the world much more eclectically and more eclectically than I think they are even realizing or giving themselves for.

What do you mean by that, Laura? I think I agree. My gut says yes, but my brain is like, articulate, no return. It makes me want to modify my... A response from earlier in the show about how the civilian readers in my life.

describe themselves? Because I think there's a difference between how they describe themselves and what their shelves actually look like. And to think about my mom or my sister, who are very classic civilian readers, if you put them on the spot for what kinds of books do you...

like to read they're going to reach for a couple genres that they're more familiar with so my mom is probably going to tell you lady librarian world war ii spies and my sister is going to be like anything about octopuses and how smart animals are but their bookshelves actually are

have much more variety. The let them theory and Colleen Hoover and maybe the wedding date. Yeah, that's interesting, Rebecca. I think you're right. I mean, I think it's for a few reasons. I think that, I don't know which of you said this, but I think our...

boundaries around genre are becoming so much more porous. It's really hard. And part of what Porter and English try to do, and we'll talk about that in a bit, is try to think about what does a pure genre look like any longer? And those things are actually quite rare. talking about Sue Grafton, you know, there's not really a pure mystery. There were much more like.

my dear Temple University colleague, Liz Moore, or at least trying to hit that particular target. Yeah. What is Reese's Book Club? What genre is that, Laura? I mean, that's what you're kind of describing there in a way.

Right. Like what is book club as a genre? Essentially, that's the question. I was having a conversation the other day about liking book club books or not. And we had a general feeling of what we were talking about, but it was not clear. That's not a genre, but it's an amount of a couple of things, a couple of vibes. Right. I also think that when it comes to maybe how the civilian reader is talking about their work, how the three of us might talk about our work, the omnivore hypothesis, you know.

allows for and recognizes the fact that cultural capital is distributed amongst genre and along these particular generic lines. And so one way of thinking about this is the acknowledgement that a true connoisseur like everything, they can tell you what's great, in fact, about Taylor Swift and why she's a true musician and also can be really into Bach to take our classical music.

metaphor can be really into mozart too like that's that's a real one right like they know and not because they're you know a diehard swifty but because they're a diehard musician um and so having an omnivorous taste of blending high and low in fact speaks more highly of you. That's the new form of cultural capital that's been associated with this sort of omnivorous world of taste. That's interesting. I mean,

I feel like I'm a little bit older than both of you, but this feels like a real last 30 years phenomenon. And maybe that 1992, I could be anchored on that. But the Gen X... plus 90s moment of a lot of cultural cachet being about having an indie band t-shirt, but then also knowing a lot about a bunch of bands.

felt different than sort of an 80s or 70s version of that. Like there was like a specific, like almost the John Cusack in high fidelity feels like an avatar for a kind of mode that we're still living in a lot of ways. And I don't know if this would have been true. I'd be curious about that omnivore thing in 1954, Laura. Like, post...

pre-rock and roll, pre-pop culture as we know it, pre-TV, I wonder how much mass media has contributed to just the omnivores availability, right? Like you don't have to get tickets to the Met. or you can consume all the stuff from your desk right now, or books, movies, and music at Borders, or Barnes & Noble or something like that. I wonder how much of it is a retail availability phenomenon as much as it is a...

I don't know what other strain it could be. I mean, that's certainly got to be part of it. Just intuitively, that seems to make sense. But when culture is much more available to you. and much more democratized in terms of its availability, but isn't in fact restricted to who can afford access to whatever symphony, whatever ballet. Or that you happen to live in a place that's close to a symphony or ballet or something like that.

seems to be the most available comparison for me and I'm interested in that and it's making me think about how Like, you know, I'm an elder millennial, the eldest of the millennials. And I grew up on I think Jeff and I grew up on some of the same alternative radio stations in Kansas City that like it's impossible now to explain to a youth what alternative music was.

really good point right like you could hear Alanis Morissette next to like Meredith Brooks next to Sarah McLachlan next to like the Mighty Mighty Boston's and Trent Reznor would come on after that. And those are all very different genres. And that was the point of the, but they were all also alternative in some way. That was the point of those kinds of radio stations. And there was cultural cachet in that mode.

of consumption, which to me feels really different from like what we see happening in. algorithm driven media, which identifies the thing you like and pulls you farther and farther down those very specific rabbit holes or those very specific tropes. Like I got a romantic novel in the mail recently from a publisher.

Instead of a traditional synopsis on the back, it was literally like an emoji checklist of the tropes in the book. And that feels to me like turning on the radio and hearing 15 versions of the same song. Are we wrong that readers are becoming more like narrowly defined? Are the algorithms, am I just mad about the algorithm, Laura? That's what I'm asking you. I mean.

Yeah, I was at, was it two years ago? I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I think two years ago, and they had this whole new adult hall that was there for the trade portion, or not the public portion of the fair, not the trade portion, where, you know, it turns into Comic-Con halfway through.

And they had these big whiteboard walls that were asking people to list their favorite tropes from from romance novels. And there was no and they were filled. You know, I went on I went into that hall finally on Friday, which is like really the first public day. And they were completely. I don't know how the rest of the weekend anyone could engage with that because that was.

The assumption here walking into the new adult hall was, of course, this is the way that we're engaging with books, not a question of what is new adult, not a question about what is romance, what is fantasy. That was beside the point. The question was like, who's your favorite literary boyfriend?

And that was the way that that that readers were being attracted to these books. So is the thing that the research is showing now that these readers who they can answer the literary boyfriend question, but they're also reading?

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But OK, let's dive into what the research is actually talking about. Let's do it. We're asking the interesting questions about this sort of work, but we have to show our work. So what Jim English and J.D. Porter have decided to do is address this problem. which is a lack of data around contemporary readers by looking at what readers are actually choosing to do, not in focus group form, not in sales data, because sales data and readership are two different things, but by looking at Goodreads.

Now, I am sure you want to wave your arms in the air. All the caveats in the world. The worst date except for all the others. Right. Yeah. Goodreads, there are problems. This is clearly not a pure lab research environment. We know that Goodreads can be manipulated. We know all of the ways. that this is problematic. Its owner is obviously at he who shall not be named level. But this is also more reader engagement than anything else that anyone can find. And what's particularly useful

useful about Goodreads for the purposes of this study is that it's not prefab definitions, right? So a Goodreads user makes an account and they decide to begin putting books on their shelves. There's a couple shelves that come pre-constructed. So every Goodreads user gets like a to-be-read shelf and I think a favorite books shelf. Just like... Very, very general, non...

genre-based things. You can put whatever you want on there. But then they're encouraged to begin making and naming their own shelves. When they do that, they are not choosing between prefabulated genres or prefabricated genres. It's not like, is this a rock?

or is this romantic or is this historical fiction? No, they get to name it whatever they want. So you have a fairly democratic approach to how readers are thinking about genre categories because they have the opportunity to construct that from the ground up. Fascinating. It is. It's very useful. And this it gives us a lot of really useful way of thinking about how genre gets conduct.

constructed, how readers are thinking about it. So what they do is they have looked at all of the super users on Goodreads who have contributed more than 150 reviews. Okay. So they are not interested in the bots. They're not interested on the dummy accounts. They're not interested in the user who goes on just to like flame one particular person that they hate. They want to find readers who are genuinely engaging on this site. meaningful way. And they've hit that benchmark as 150 reviews.

So this is less than half a percent of all Goodreads users. I was just about to ask that. I was sitting here doing math about the average number of books people read in a year. Yeah. This is like a shockingly low percentage of Goodreads readers, but also like Goodreads is huge. I think thinking about it in that, in those terms gave me some sense of how impossibly...

huge engagement on this site is. Right. Yeah. A small percentage of a very large data set. So still a really robust pool that they're looking at. Do we want to do methodology now, Laura? Let's do the stats and then we can look at it later because I've got a couple of methodology selection questions about that particular filter. So they've got this 0.2% of all the Goodreads super users amounts to around 3,200 users. Okay. From that, they begin to randomly select.

uh just using random generator random number generators they randomly select users that they want to study who have submitted these at least 150 reviews and what they're able to do then is extrapolate these are all of the reviews that they've submitted but more importantly these are all of

the books that they have on all of their shelves. So less interested in the particular views than they've published, more interested in like where they put them. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And even books that they don't review. Right. You have to have a certain degree of investment to review a book. But that that sort of investment is not required to shelf a book. Got it. So they're interested in like.

Is there a shelf that's like my favorite mysteries or is the shelf like feminist revenge thrillers? They're really interested in what these shelves are named generally and are using them to kind of crowdsource the genre categories that are most salient.

So Jeff, you know, your question up top was, well, what are we calling genres? What are we thinking about when we think about genre? Porter and English found eight real categories that kind of rise to the top. We can talk methods later, but this is using network analysis and community detection. blah blah blah the point is there are eight main genre clusters that emerge uh and these are

Like this is so basically common to you that it will not be even surprising, but it is really useful and helpful to see that readers are basically affirming these categories. So we've got children's, fantasy sci-fi, graphic novels, historical, literary. mystery, thriller, nonfiction, and romance. Eight. And that's basically how readers are classifying their books. That's how the kind of genre map of Goodreads looks.

But what's tricky gets back to this question that we came earlier to, which is that it is so hard to classify a book as being any particular genre. Right. So I am teaching tomorrow. My class and I are going to finish Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Which is fantasy, historical and literary.

Exactly. Obviously in this class is, is this historical fiction? Well, underground railroad was not a physically real place. That was an actual railroad under underground. Like that's not real. So it's speculative fiction, but wait. All of these other instances are real. The horrors of slavery are being presented here in ways that are historical, in ways that are drawing on the meta slave narrative and on the slave narrative as a genre. So what are we going to do with Underground Railroad?

To classify it as one thing is to cut out at least 50% of what this book is doing and really I think blunts the force of what Whitehead is trying to do in this novel. So what's really useful about this method is that it helps us classify any particular book

based on how users classify it. So hypothetically, and this is just what I'm making up, we might say that Underground Railroad is 70% historical fiction. So it's a genre cloud rather than a shelf. It's like a Heisenberg uncertainty, like electron cloud, a possibility. Interesting. Yes, exactly. So not only can we see how readers are gravitating toward individual genres, but we can see how any particular book relates to these larger genre categories based on how readers are shelving them.

Oh my God, this is so great. It's so nerdy. I love it. And it's wonderful. So based on how I might think of Underground Railroad as 70% historical and 30% speculative, that's not about the internal generic forms or tropes that we see. 70% of users are calling this historical fiction and 30% of users are calling this speculative fiction. Here we go. This is our total map of how people are relating to and understanding Underground Railroad, say.

So the example, an example that they use that I think is also really illustrative is Gone Girl. Which is, you know, the genre score would depend on how many people are calling this book a thriller, which is 83%. And what percentage of people are calling this a romance, which is 17%. And I simply do not understand those people. What?

Yeah, but this is giving us a pretty, you know, a map. Well, we do. We've talked about this, Rebecca. We have romance, but we don't have a word for relationship stories. And I think that's a relationship story, a bad romance, I guess, if Gaga is involved in genre-fying it. But if you think it is mostly about a relationship... then your only available heuristic for genre is romance. You don't have another place to put that.

It makes sense. I don't agree with it, but it makes sense to me. I mean, I agree with you conceptually, but not about Gone Girl specifically. Carry on, Laura. Get us out of this. Well, I mean, Gone Girl is also a book that is really cleverly playing with genre tropes. Right.

Amy's diary that she writes is partly her own mockery of the genre of the romance. It's got the meet cute. It's got the first kiss in Manhattan. It's got all of these cute little things that come straight from a romance novel.

that she's she's making a mockery of you know and and that's that's part of what's really clever about this book so i can see it you know it's not it's not completely unreasonable anyway all that to say with all of this data English Importer give each super user essentially an eclecticism score. So how eclectic is their reading? How are readers approaching genre? Are they, according to the narratives that we have about romance bookstores, about the...

internal division of bookstores, about how the publishing industry works and presumes that they're readers existing in the world. Are we looking at readers who are diehard in one particular area, or are we looking at readers who have tastes that are broad? And to do that we need to think not only about the shelves that they're making, what they're reading in, but where each particular book fits.

So this is getting to be a little bit more challenging to think about, but basically what they do is they plot the distance between each book. So imagine for a moment, eight dimensional space. It's impossible, but... But this world exists mathematically where they can calculate the distance between each given book. I will not describe this in detail. I'm watching Jeff's eyes glaze over. No, no, no. I think I'm with you. I'm with you. You look like you're suppressing a yawn.

But thanks. So the results, basically. is looking at the readers who are most and least eclectic and what they're reading, but then also what eclecticism happens to mean within these different reading communities.

So the results are unfortunately, in some ways, a little bit stereotypical, but I think this gets complicated in really important ways. bear with me through the stereotypes for a moment, or at least the reinforcement of our stereotypes. So those readers who are the least eclectic are reading primarily romance novels.

So there does seem to be a deep connection between romance and deep, um, whatever the opposite of not omnivorous is. I think the author said univore. I would have thought monovore, like really deep, univorous, um, mono. They're like koalas. They only eat eucalyptus. Like they literally only eat eucalyptus. This feels true to me. I mean, this has been true for a long, long time. This is not a new story about like...

If you're going to imagine for yourself the hardest core genre reader, there is a reason why there were Harlequin romance novels in drugstores, right? That's not a mistake. Yes, there are really important gendered histories that are worth thinking about there. And the way that those readers get castigated, the way that those readers get vilified, and the way that we are still doing that actively, like there's a reason why.

the is reading making a stupid conversation is turning on romanticcy and self-publishing, right? But yeah, I mean, that is true. We'll complicate that in a moment. Do you have the next most eucalyptus-y genre? I can look it up for you. I did not write that on my talking points. Tell me if this makes sense to you, Rebecca. If you were to guess the second most eucalyptus-y genre, I think I'm guessing mysteries. Me too. I don't know if that's...

Right. But if our spidey sense about romance continues to be correct, that would be my next... In our eight-dimensional space. I would put mysteries like closest to romance, but still pretty far away in terms of that. universe mono mono whatever vocabulary word we're going with reading a whole lot of one thing literary koalas literary koalas

So I can't find that for you quickly. What I can say is then on the flip side of this is that the readers who are most eclectic are also the readers who are reading the most literary fiction. That makes so much sense because it's sort of the non-genre that is a genre. We are seeing the high-low divide, right? That's being reinforced even in the way that Goodreads readers are approaching their own eclecticism.

i mean there are some really uh i mean that said there's a lot more romance readers um than there are literary fiction readers like it's not as though this is an equally divided sample um But generally speaking, the literary readers are showing not only that they read across most genres, that they're more eclectic in that way, but they're also showing greater complexity in what it is that they're interested in reading. That resonates with what you were saying earlier about the...

one of the theories of being omnivorous in that there's cultural capital to be gained from being able to explain both Bach and why Taylor Swift is so great. I think I see that in literary fiction. communities of like I and like Jeff and I are doing it on Zero to Well Read of like here we are to talk about a Nobel Prize winning novel and we want to talk about Twilight and take them both seriously and understand them. We might have different levels of affection for them.

But there is something like some level of serious engagement with the thing itself. And being a person who engages seriously with the thing carries a level of cultural capital that you might be trying to cultivate for yourself. Well, and I suspect and here I'm moving beyond their paper. So apologies if I'm putting words in your mouth, my friends. But, you know, I would not call myself I think I'm an eclectic reader. I read primarily in literary, but literary fiction is.

of non-genre genre like that is not a thing i would describe um when i'm reading for work or i'm reading for fun

But I say I'm an eclectic reader because I tend to read the best of everything. Right. Like I joined for research. I joined a romance book club at one of my local bookstores this summer. And I. thought oh i will have so much fun i did have so much fun but i thought i would really enjoy the books that we were reading because i like emily henry or you know i like i like a couple romance novelists like this is fine i found out very quickly

I am not a romance reader. I do not. Never let other people pick your books. It's the worst plan. Yeah. I'm also just not a romance reader. I like.

a writer who writes romance right i am not a crime novelist or reader you know like i i really like tana french i really like essay cosby but generally speaking i'm not reading crime it's not it's not what i'm doing right so i think what we probably see is people who are approaching literature, not necessarily via genre, but via some other sort of quality markers that speaks to the kind of omnivorous quality of like.

Literary fiction is kind of the alternative radio station in this model. All we need is Oishi, Rebecca, psychological richness. That's all we need. We're seeking, we're exploring. There's something about finding something new is what we're looking for. But it is, I think it makes sense.

this like alternative radio station analogy is working for me here because where else like is Tony Morrison is doing something totally different in The Bluest Eye than like Ishiguro is doing in Clara in The Sun then Colson Whitehead is doing in Underground Railroad. They all have elements of genre to them as well. But it's like highbrow writing.

That's the unifying thing is the highbrow writing, but very different flavors, very different tones, very different subject matter. But we call it all literary fiction in the same way that everybody got lumped into that alternative. pop or alternative rock model where i think what you're going for i i'm i agree with like

I agree with this research that has confirmed it, Laura. This makes sense to me. I think that people are looking for some underlying like connective tissue rather than some quality rather than like. a plot point or a particular subject. Or just a different experience. I mean, maybe it's as simple as if you sort of evacuate it from any value judgment, they're looking for a different kind of experience.

And if you're looking for a different kind of experience, you have different kind of reading patterns. Like that sort of just makes logical sense.

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What's really interesting about some of these findings though is that even though romance represents the largest genre of these super users of the things that they've rated and in many ways the least eclectic what um english and porter have found in other research that i talked about in that five mind-blowing stats episode is that romance is really a world in and of itself

so unlike with other genres you could be primarily a romance reader and also be a very eclectic reader right because you could be invested in cozies and also in hockey romances and also in like mfm romance it like there are so many different

worlds, sub-worlds within romance that is really not comparable to any other genre. Yeah, it does seem like that's one of the ways that we've done romance readers dirty. And we've done them dirty in a lot of ways, but by assuming that or kind of treating all romance readers as being...

monolithic, as if reading one romance is similar to reading another one. It's almost like Madagascar. It's spent 70 million years off the coast of Africa, so it has its own ecosystem that's just sort of evolved differently because it was separate. I think something similar has happened in-

You're not all koalas. You're just like, we have lemurs. No one else has lemurs, but we were put on this island. We escaped to this island, whatever you want to put. I've used this metaphor in marketing and publicity meetings too. It's that romance. and I'll throw romanticy in for the time being provisionally, are sort of a snow globe universe. It has homologous structures to the larger reading world, but there's less...

There's less penetration between the two worlds than you might think, given the narratives around either and both of them. But I think what's happened... in publishing if i may editorialize i think the genre narrative has struck hold so entirely that we've missed sight of the literary omnivorousness now even in this research

Porter and English acknowledged that the literary omnivorous reader is a much smaller set. This is a numerically smaller representation. But genre is still, it just does not seem to be the thing. that is really drawing readers to particular books. I don't see here. That's not the clear and easy division. You simply don't see readers, with the exception of romance, who read only one thing and only one thing forever.

There is a really broad, I think, inner penetration that readers who call themselves eclectic statistically really are. And I think that we are doing that reader a disservice when we approach the situation through matters of genre. This is so interesting. So it sounds like I'm now being practical here. If I'm trying to get my book in the hands of the right reader.

I may be correct. I may have the highest marginal use case of every additional marketing or publicity dollar if I have a romance book leaning into genre marketing. But maybe for anything that's not that, that's not as useful.

Seems possible. And that just bears out kind of what we've seen experientially, right, Rebecca? That's an articulation of something that's felt, if not exactly put in a spreadsheet for us somewhere. I'm thinking too just about the ways that... people talk about books the way we talk about books and we describe them the way that civilian readers in my life talk about books. And most of the time that a book comes up, they don't lead with the genre. I was going to ask about that.

If you say, what's it about? And you're doing, say, Gone Girl. You get this woman disappears and like you think that one thing has happened for most of the book and then there's this big twist about the disappearance. And so like there's kind of a mystery, but it's doing all of these other things and it's working on these other levels.

about underground railroad you get well it explored it's about slavery but also in this alternate version of the past where the underground railroad is a physical thing and there's some magic realism is probably the first like genre word that would come up in someone's definition.

of Underground Railroad, but that's not- I think you're right. I think it's much more experiential than it is bookshelf label. This is the thing that makes booksellers and librarians better at matching readers to books than publishers are, is that the booksellers and librarians-

or hopefully us when people write in with here's what I'm looking for, like folks are telling them what they liked about a novel or what they liked about that memoir that they just read. And the librarian or the bookseller is doing matchmaking about how. something that they know about how it feels to read that book, the experience that the reader is getting, not the ingredients that go into the book.

Laura, can I ask you about methodology quickly about using this half percent? Because one thing I know about Goodreads users, or I used to know, it may no longer be true, is that they are more intense of a book consumer than...

other people that aren't on Goodreads, right? And then if you take a subset of a subset, which is the most active Goodreads user who are already more active in logging and interacting with their books, I wonder, does that make this subset... representative more representative less representative i don't i don't know if there's we don't have a control group for like how these people compare against something else what are your thoughts about that

Yeah, it's also very, very Anglophone. This is really, really skewed toward the United States. It's really skewed toward Anglophone readers. There is not a lot here that's comparable to literature in other languages. I mean, I think that there is problems with how representative it is, but we also don't have any data about what... the population might be no we don't have a median control group to like say how you know how many standard deviations away is from my dad who i think of as a very

eclectic, generally interested reader who will never rate something on Goodreads in his life, but he's influential in his like retiree group about what books are good. Like, is he more representative than this 0.5%? I could believe yes and no. I can't keep my bearings there. I mean, I think...

Like we said at the outset, it's the worst data set except for everything else because you cannot get this kind of robust data that you can do analysis on because you don't see people's bookshelves. You can't go in enough people's bookshelves to see what's on their shelf at their cabin or their study or whatever.

It's that distinction between book buying and book readership that really matters. The things that people buy might look, I'm just guessing, but might look more narrow than... what actually gets read um especially when when you factor in like gift giving and how like the dad book gets talked about as if it's one thing but also that's its own whole unit the dad book is a vibe it's a universe of a variety of genres This is so juicy, Laura.

I know. And there's so many, they do such, they go into such great examples. There are so many different heuristics that people use when they're selecting books. So one of the really great case studies that they looked at was the romance issue for one. But they looked at one user who, for instance, has been very...

committed to reading books by African-American writers. So you might take, you know, the African-American History Month to say like, this is a month where I'm reading only books by African-American writers or Latinx writers during Latinx History Month or women writers. You know, we have all of these. different programs at libraries, for instance, or one book programs to encourage that particular sort of reading. Based on this particular user's profile.

reading books only by African American writers also meant that that their list skewed extraordinarily prestigious. Yes. Even though African-American writers and writers of color have long been marginalized, those who have been allowed in have been outsized in terms of their representation and rewards by prize committees, by one book committee.

by syllabi, like there is a greater value placed on those very, very few writers who are allowed entrance to the field. So approaching this question, not via genre, but by some other metric. then kind of makes all of these problems of inequality and prestige and class compound on each other in ways that I find so fascinating that, again, we just totally miss in the genre conversation. Does this research make its way to the publishing industry?

I don't know, but I think, I mean, I don't know how it would, other than this podcast and a little sub stack that someone tries to run every now and again. I wonder who writes that one. I don't know. But I mean, one of the findings that I found to be most depressing to me as an English professor who is trying to reach the same exact people that publishers are, which is young readers trying to make sure that they are lifelong committed readers after they come through my class.

is that one of the other ways that English Importer looked at this data was they wondered about how taste changes over time. So none of this data is timestamped, but what they are able to do is look at the...

like the lifespan of a user's account. So what are things that people are putting on shelves early in their lifespan as a Goodreads user? And what they found is that often when people are signing up for Goodreads, they tend to shelve things that they've already read. And that's where you see things like classics. That's where you see things like labeled literary fiction. That's where you see your zero to well-read syllabi.

really getting shelved is when people are building their profiles really, really early. And then as time goes on, they have their more natural reading selections, right? These are the things that I'm reading on a day-to-day basis as opposed to making sure that my shelf is represented digitally.

And what they found is that literature, literary fiction does not seem to be a sticky category, which is to say it's something that gets added early, but then it doesn't necessarily persist at the same level throughout.

As an English professor, this destroys me a little bit. Yep, I see. But this feels true in my social life, certainly. But the things that I spend my time and my efforts and energies teaching that I think, like, this is what makes a good life. This is what it means to be an engaged...

citizen, literary citizen, but also just citizen of the world. Those are not necessarily the things that people are going to continue reading. They're not going to necessarily continue reading in that vein, though they are more likely to put those things on their favorite book's shelves. There's that cultural capital again. Yes. The genre that is, however, very sticky, that seems to be consistent across, you can guess, that seems to be consistent across people's reading lives is...

You can guess now if you want. Romance. No. No? Uh-uh. I think it's fantasy. It is mysteries and thrillers. My next romance is a romance is a one of one, but then the sorting mechanism, I have mystery thrillers as being the stickiest from there, I guess. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a ton of sense. I look at my kids reading who are middle grade into high school now. They would read a middle grade mystery, right? They're available to them earlier than, say...

I guess there's fantasy available early. I wonder if fantasy has a similar shape to literary fiction, where you read a lot of it younger, and then as you get older. I thought about this the other day. If I weren't doing this job right now... And I was just doing some other, you know, media and Jeff job. I wonder how...

The gravitational pull of dad books for somewhat of my demographics would be pretty strong. Like you wouldn't have spent the weekend reading Sophocles like we just did. I don't know. It's usually because my dad, when he was about my age, not to make this whole podcast about my dad, he had a, not a.

he had a reading midlife crisis where he sort of came back to the classics and like literary fiction. Like I remember him distinctly reading Plutarch in his like armchair when I was like 16. So I think I maybe have a little bit of, I could have done a little bit of that of its own kind. I think it makes, I understand why.

literature and literary fiction don't stick and i wonder how much of it too is that it's it's prescribed reading like the first time that we encounter literature is in school and a lot of people have really negative experiences with that and I have just a negative valence around reading something serious, reading something that feels like work. And then it's hard to.

It's hard to market literary fiction. Those are books that are often hard to talk about and like elevator pitch sorts of ways that would be sticky and compelling. I don't think it's complicated. I mean, tell me what you think about this, guys. I think people mostly in their lives are pain avoidant. And if you pick up literary fiction or the classics, some of those are spiky. They're just going to be more spiky than what's on the best seller. I mean, I honestly think it's as simple as that.

is that some of those, you read the first couple of pages of The Bluest Die or the first couple of pages of Ulysses or something you've heard about or Remembrance of Things Past, and you're like, what the shit is this? My life is too short. I'm a working stiff. I've got things to worry about. I'd rather pick up something that's more pleasurable, that's more conventionally interesting, or at the very least takes less friction to get into.

i think the variance is going to be high the things you find in laura's class you're going to love some of those people are going to love and some they hate like some of the stuff i mean i'll speak for myself that i was required to read their classics I really didn't care for, I cared for a lot less than my median Reese Witherspoon book club, but also the things I loved, I loved a lot more than anything. I'm going to find some there. I just think the variance is so high for most people.

But can you hear how it's so impossible to get outside of class even in this discussion? Like it's so impossible to move outside of social class and economic class as we think about taste hierarchies. I think one, you know, to the question of does this get to the publishing industry? And I think one real problem is that book sales data means that we are immediately and always looking at moneyed individuals who are buying books that that requires a degree of money.

I think library data would probably show us something a lot different if that was a primary metric, a primary way of looking at how books are being read and consumed. Whenever we see the most checked out stories at the end of the year from like the NYPL, the BPL, those are always interesting because they don't neatly...

line with the best-selling books of the year. I think that's an argument for using this Goodreads data instead of something else, is that you don't have to have purchased the book in order to have read it and put it on a Goodreads shelf. You do still need a certain level of socioeconomic access to the internet.

and time and awareness to be using something like Goodreads, but it's not gated as much as book sales data would be. Rebecca? And I sometimes use this question, Lauren. I'm curious to see what your answer would be. And I'm sure that you have a million of them. But looking at this data that you're looking at today and talking with us about, if you could get the true answer to one question, forget about whether you get to go.

from the fount of truth, wherever that may be, and you get to dip your cup once. What is the thing that you find yourself most wanting to know about this data, American reading habits, or like something related to genre. Forget about whether it's what could be possible to understand. Like, what is the, you know, the secret within the secret that you'd like to know? I guess I want to know what...

what makes people read literary fiction that is not required? Like what makes them pick up Toni Morrison some random day when they're, you know, waiting in the carpool line when they're 39 years old which is my life um like i i want to know what makes people read literature i was later in life i when i'm at my local pals they have a coffee shop next door and it's

a great spot for seeing what people are reading because they just bought it the readers they have their book and their coffee and i'm always interested to see but there was a guy yesterday reading um the world according to guard by john irving and i was like interesting Why today? Why in the world? Why? Why today? I mean, there's no bad answer to that. It's not it's like that could be anything. Did you.

you saw it at a little free library you just decided one how in the world today did that particular person decide world according to garb i think i think you hit on I think you hit on something there, Laura. And this is what the publishing industry would like to know, and it's kind of unanswerable for reasons we can't, because they want to put their messaging wherever those rivers are, and they just don't know. And they're maybe outside of the ability of us to understand where they are.

I want to know that for the sake of publishing. I want to know that so that way good books can continue to be in the world because those good books are managing to find their readers most effectively. But I also want to know that for the classroom. teach classes on the bestseller. I'm teaching a book on young adult literature in the spring. I have...

I have kind of shifted my Overton window to I want students to be reading and I want them to be thinking critically and talking about books, whatever it is that they're reading. And so if getting them excited about reading now makes them more likely to keep on reading, I do not care. I mean, I do care, but I would rather get them things that are going to fuel that excitement and hope that that can continue when they're outside of my class instead of.

instead of asking them to read the books that I think that they should read, that I think make my world better, make them better. Maybe my dream follow on to your dream question then is like, what books make the best gateway drugs?

This is, I think we want to be mindful of our time here with Professor McGrath. I'll be season two of Zero to All Radio. Anything else you were going to throw at us, Laura, before we let you go? No, this was, it was so wonderful to talk to you and so fun to talk about fun data and fun research. And I think that's all it got for us today. Laura, remind me the name of your sub stack. I knew it's a good title, but I can't remember what it is.

It's called Text Crunch. There it is. Yep. Text Crunch. We'll be able to remember that. We'll put a link in the show notes. Bookriot.com slash listen. You can choose an email podcast at bookriot.com. We used to be especially interested in little birdies in the industry that listen today.

Are these conversations you've had? Is this a surprise to you? Are you a 26-year-old junior marketer who's been trying to shake the cage and you're like, people will read anything. It doesn't just have to be extra Y. Or was your hair really blown back? by what Laura brought us today. A pleasure. Dr. Laura McGrath of Temple. Rebecca, thank you. We'll talk to you all later.

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