Identifying Life-Changing Books with LLMs

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TLDR: Language models can analyze millions of book reviews, to identify books most likely for readers to say it "changed their life." See the generated list of the 300 most life-changing books here.

Contents<br>Intro<br>Basic Approach

Main Event: Table of Life-Changing Books

Validating the Results

Most Life-Changing Authors

Life-Changing Books Are Not the Most-Read or Top-Rated<br>Relationship between Life-changing and Most-Read Books

Aside: Calvin and Hobbes is the Best

Conclusion<br>Acknowledgements

Appendix: Guided Tour of the Life-Changing Books List<br>Part I (1-25): Self-help / Spiritual / Religion

Second phase (25-150): More diversity

Last phase(150-300): Autobiographies, young adult, and novels

Appendix: Technical Details<br>LLM Embeddings

Classifier

Calculating Life-Changing Score

Autogeneration of categories and descriptions

Limitations

Intro

This is hands down the most beautiful and life-changing thing I've ever read. READ IT. Right now.

-review of Tiny Beautiful Things

Amazingly, $20 can buy archived wisdom that alters the course of your life: providing a new life-philosophy, shattering emotional experiences, or a new way of seeing the world. But we encounter books haphazardly -- for example, through algorithms that count all five-star reviews as equal (whether they are life-savers or just page-turners).

This project aims at a data-driven way to identify books that can change your life. Key data comes from a scrape of GoodReads which includes millions of written reviews of books (up through 2017; thanks to Mengting Wan for creating this dataset).

Text reviews are rich with details about readers' experiences (how it made them feel; how it impacted their life). With language models (LLMs) we can analyze these reviews at scale to explore "life-changingness" quantitatively. From over six million reviews of over 24,000 books, this project identifies the top 300 "life-changing" ones.

Basic Approach

The approach: apply (LLMs) to embed reviews (changing sentences into vectors), to see what books most frequently have "life-changing" reviews (where the reader says the book changed their life).

The embedding model (I used one from OpenAI) changes sentences into lists of numbers, and a classifier I trained maps those numbers to whether the sentence represents a life-changing sentiment (like "This book changed my life."). The result is a pipeline where you can pass through all text reviews of a gven book, and get out what percentage of those reviews were 'life-changing.' Then you can do that for all of the books, and see which ones have the highest percentage (the most life-changing books).

More technical details are at the post's end.

Main Event: Table of Life-Changing Books

Here's the table of the 300 books itself, in order of their "life-changing"ness scores. More analysis (like most life-changing authors) follows the table, if you're interested.

You can sort (by clicking on columns), un-hide columns (like author), search (by entering into the search bar), or select a genre of interest (from the genre filter).

Tip: click on the genre filter to look for the most life-changing novels or books on health, finances, productivity, or philosophy.

Show/hide column : Rank - Author - Genre - Score

Genre filter :

[none]<br>Novel<br>Autobiography<br>Science Fiction<br>Philosophy<br>Productivity<br>Relationships<br>Personal Development<br>Psychology<br>Health<br>Young Adult<br>Financial<br>Creativity<br>Feminism<br>Leadership<br>Buddhism<br>Spirituality

TitleAuthorGenreScore

[+]1Your Erroneous ZonesWayne W. Dyer Psychology0.079"Your Erroneous Zones" is a self-help book by Wayne W. Dyer, which focuses on psychological techniques for emotional and behavioral self-improvement, urging readers to take control of their lives by overcoming self-destructive patterns. Since its publication in 1976, the book has been both widely praised for its practical advice and impact on personal growth, while also facing criticism for oversimplification and lack of empirical support.<br>[+]2Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of LifeMaxwell Maltz Psychology0.076"Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life" by Maxwell Maltz explores the concept of self-image and its impact on the achievement of personal goals, suggesting that positive change in one's life can be achieved through visualization and altering self-perception. While the book has been influential and has inspired many in the fields of psychology and self-help, some critics argue that its scientific basis can be thin and its claims sometimes lack rigorous empirical support.<br>[+]3Nonviolent Communication: A Language of LifeMarshall B. Rosenberg Relationships0.067Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg introduces a method of communication aimed at fostering empathy and understanding in...