I agree with you and John Emerson that the libaries on LT do tend to cluster in certain areas which strongly influences how the unsuggester operates. I think SF and Christian probably are overrepresented in comparison to, say, romance or mysteries in LT as a whole. But at the same time, unsuggester is probably right to identify SF and Christian clusters as more marginal than romance or mysteries as well and so more likely to be an anti-book.

A fun parlor game from the unsuggester is to check for anti-book combinations that you hold in your own library. You mention one such combination for my own library: we have both The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (though we have our LWW in a box set which is probably not counted by the algorithm used by Unsuggester). I suspect that if you searched your catalog carefully, you could also come up with a anti-book combination that you have.

Oh, what a parish, a terrible parish;
Oh, what a parish is that o’ Dunkeld.
They hangit their minister, droon’d their precentor,
Dang doun the steeple and fuddled the bell.

The steeple was doun but the kirk was still staunin’,
They biggit a lum whaur the bell used to hang.
A stell-pat they gat and they brewed Hielan’ whisky;
On Sundays they drank it and ranted and sang.

O, had you but seen how graceful it lookit,
To see the crammed pews sae socially joined.
MacDonald the piper stood up in the poopit,
He made the pipes skirl out the music divine.

Wi’ whiskey and beer they’d curse and they’d swear;
They’d argue and fecht what ye daurna weel tell.
Bout Geordie and Charlie they bothered fu’ rarely
Wi’ whisky they’re worse than the devil himsel’.

When the hairt-cheerin’ spirit had mounted their garret,
Tae a ball on the green they a’ did adjourn.
The maids wi’ coats kilted, they skippit and liltit,
When tired they shook hands and then hame did return.

If the kirks a’ owre Scotland held like social meetin’s
Nae warnin’ ye’d need from a far-tinklin’ bell,
For true love and friends wad draw ye thegither
Far better than roarin’ the horrors o’ hell.

Readers of Complicity, by Ian Banks, are apparently particularly unlikely to own the 9/11 Commission Report. Possibly a reflection on the Scottishness of the audience for his non-sci-fi work.

But yep, you seem right that owners of, for instance, Scottish contemporary fiction don’t often seem to have large evangelical or bodice-ripping collections. Those two groups should get together and go drinking some time.

It would be interesting to try and parse more precisely how many LT collections are fantasy-exclusive, how many are hard-SF exclusive, and so on. But I think there would have to be more heterogenity among the collections there–I think the highly motivated collectors there tend to be people with the most comprehensive and far-reaching collections of a particular sub-type (SF/fantasy, theology and religion, political philosophy, etc.)

http://www.orgnet.com/divided.html
http://www.orgnet.com/divided2.html

Not entirely unrelated.

But what about the divides within speculative fiction? Do people ominverously read everything from Hal Clement to Piers Anthony? Or can one detect the fractioning out of reading habits within the SF field?