Issue #43: 'You should read so-and-so,' or the trouble with recommending stuff

The art of making personalised suggestions. Plus, what the 'Discover' algorithm will never get right.

Over the bank holiday weekend, I went to All Points East, a music festival in east London. Festivals are, as a friend pointed out recently, the perfect place to discover new music. Not only are you likely feeling relaxed and open to novelty (embracing the ‘festival spirit’), it’s also cost-effective. Essentially, you’re attending back-to-back gigs for the same price you’d pay for one act’s stand-alone show. Anyway, what made my day at All Points East special wasn’t the breadth of artists performing, but the person I was there with: my cousin Ashley, a music aficionado who curated a line-up of artists for us to see across the various stages ahead of the headline act, HAIM.

Sharing cultural tastes, whether it’s a certain artist or a beloved book, is a mutually-enriching form of connection, whether it’s with your extended family – mine seem to be getting a lot of love recently in this newsletter – or a first date. It creates a micro-community, a shared slice of the world to trade insights and opinions about. It’s a jumping-off point for real-life socialising, like how trading theatre recommendations can show you who to invite the next time that Old Vic ticket release email comes through. It’s true of my plans for tonight, actually: a new friend and I are attending an author talk at the Bloomsbury Waterstones. Our first-ever meet-up, early this summer, left me with a recommended reading list as long as my arm – and I’ve already read tonight’s novel (Alone by Daniel Schrieber) upon her recommendation.

Even just establishing everyday rituals, like a regular WhatsApp debrief about the latest episode of a mutually-adored TV show beginning with a frenetic ‘HAVE YOU WATCHED IT YET?!’ text, makes life that little bit sweeter. It’s also a way to fulfil that old cliche of ‘talking about ideas, rather than people’. OK, it’s not clear-cut – especially given that I enjoy character-driven stories – but it feels a lot gentler to discuss, say, what And Just Like That Carrie Bradshaw’s named her new kitten, rather than gossiping about a mutual frenemy.

When recommendations are (accidentally) offensive

And yet, it’s not as simple as that. Recommendations are, at their best, a gift of a few life-affirming minutes or hours; an invitation to share a slice of the world together that might otherwise have been experienced in isolation (especially if you live alone). A thoughtful book or song recommendation can make you feel intimately known in the way a Clintons greeting card never will.

‘People seek to be known. Someone else taking interest in you and what you enjoy and like is part of that. If someone sends you a recommendation, or remembers to say it to you in person, to me it’s a way of them saying: “I thought of you/it reminded me of you”. And, vice versa, if you take that recommendation and show an interest in it, it shows them you care about them.’ – Marise, 32

At their worst, recommendations can feel like a homework assignment (‘You still haven’t watched that show I recommended!’); a form of virtue-signalling (‘You should read War & Peace’); or a subliminal message (my friend’s mum still brings up the time her daughter recommended Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, a book centred around a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, although the reality is, ‘I just thought she’d like the book!’).