In my journey to find out why I dislike the Witcher books, I've made an AI prompt that very accurately determines whether any work of fiction leans virtuous or immoral. It's pretty accurate too.
Using it I also found that the New York Times' top 100 books of the 21st century are mostly devoid of traditional virtues or even actively against them.
Personally, I tend to enjoy fiction for entertainment value and get a bit annoyed when virtuous and politically fashionable mansplaining is weaved into the tale.
Funny enough, a book like that would probably score low on the rubric I ended up with.
Virtue in the sense of real virtues of goodness, not virtue-signalling. And genuinely part of the story and not pedantic or overbearing.
This is a super interesting pursuit. Would love to see your results somehow displayed in a chart or infographic. It could be a useful way of portray the depravity of modern media.
Best I can do on short notice is color the scores the NYT "best books of the 21st century according to elites" list got. A score of less than 6 is either mixed morality or neutral all the way down to immoral or even evil. And that makes up pretty much 80% of the list. It tops out at around 8, and there are lots of very good books that sit above that rating, with ratings of 8 to 9.5.
And after I wrote that, I also took the top 100 goodreads books (which is slightly better than NYT), and a personal list I made of books I now plan on reading (and some I've already read). And the books that I've read that skew green/red do actually match my own experience with them, so I'm fairly confident in the results for books I haven't read.
**New York Times:**
**GoodReads**
**Personal**
Wow, I’d say that does a pretty good job of painting a picture!
You’ve read a lot of books too. What book from your list would you recommend to others to read?
It's pretty cool to see 😁
Some of the ones on that list that I have read:
The Lord of the Rings
A Wizard of Earthsea
To Kill a Mockingbird
Needful Things
More than half of those are ones I haven't read yet, but have been in my audiobook library. I was able to cut some from the list that I wouldn't have enjoyed thanks to this prompt.
Lord of the Rings is such a task to take on, but it would be cool to read it at some point. I haven’t heard of A Wizard of Earthsea or Needful Things though. I’ll have to check those out. Thanks!
Lord of the Rings is the best of the best of the last century, a true modern epic. And you're welcome!
Absolutely. I read it first as a teenager, and a couple more times since (the hobbit included). I go back and forth between that and the Foundation series being my favorites. I'm a pretty big Asimov fan.
I've read Dune more times than I can remember. Such an incredible book for the year it was written, so much better than the awful movie adaptations. https://briangreen.net/reading
Yup.
I didn't need AI to tell me that, though. 😂
It's pretty obvious that you shouldn't look to the NYT to tell you what to read after all 😂
But moreso, it's nice to be able to preview books that other people suggest too. Especially if they're highly acclaimed, but are shit when you go to actually read them. It's going to save me a lot of time.
Oh, that's a good use case! Bravo.
Shocking /s
