I have been really interested in reading intentionally unlikeable main characters (MCs) this year and now I'm wanting to dig into some "data" around reader ratings/perceptions about books with intentionally unlikeable MCs. So I searched through PB Club for posts talking about intentionally unlikeable MCs and pulled the book titles mentioned in those threads so I could start digging into ratings/reviews.

(Note: I'm grouping authors who use she/her pronouns on their website as women and authors who use he/him pronouns on their websites as men.)

Here's the problem: When I started looking over the raw data I've pulled so far, I realized two things: One - these threads have overwhelmingly referenced books that by women and Two - when people referenced books written by men they were often classics.

Currently the average year published for books written by women is 2017 where books written by men is 1974.5. Yikes This data is just for fun/learning, buuuuuut now that I have seen potential issues in the data - I can't unsee it.

The ask So I'm coming to PB club again for help! What books were written by men (authors who currently use he/him pronouns) from 1990 to present day where the general understanding is that the main character was written to be intentionally unlikeable? If it's close too 1990 that's fine too - I would rather err on the side of more data than less considering the data is a bit of a mess right now. My goal is to have all of the books in the final dataset to be referenced/recommended by Pagebound users, cause I trust that y'all aren't bots... everywhere else is suspect at this point.

I'm only planning on doing simple quantitative analyses buuuuuuuut if you wanna share any of your thoughts on unlikeable characters, why you usually like reading about them/usually don't like reading about them, what makes an unlikeable character enjoyable/tolerable for you vs when you DNF or give it a low star rating - I definitely won't complain!!

Brief glimpse at the very rough data so far

• Overall, readers like books unlikeable MCs! Average star score rating per book range from 3.38 to 4.21 (average is 3.86).
• The average book in the current dataset has predominately 4 or 5 star reviews: 5 stars 32.04%, 4 stars 35.82%, 3 stars 21.52%, 2 stars 7.40%, and 1 star 3.21%

Statistically significant results on the very rough data with a small sample size pretty much everything might change once I get more data HOW TO READ CORRELATIONS (skip if you're familiar... unless you are a math teacher/good at explaining stats cause idk how to explain stats. I'll edit this post with your explanation - I did my best 😭 😭 😭 😭) If you aren't familiar with p values, p stands for probability and it ranges from 0-1. I'm using p ≤ 0.05 as the cut off for results that are statistically significant. You can think of p ≤ 0.05 like this: if there was really no relationship between these two things (variables), how often would random luck alone give us a pattern this strong? When p = 0.05 that is 1 time in 20 times it was actually random luck. The smaller the p the harder it is to explain this pattern away as a coincidence.

r is probably going to be easier to understand with the actual data examples below, but r ranges from -1 to +1. Use the - or + to understand the direction of the pattern on a graph. A negative number means as one variable increases, the other variable decreases (like going down a slide). A positive number means means both variables increase together (like climbing up a set of stairs). The closer to 1 (positive or negative) the closer the data points on the graph fall on a perfectly straight line. -0.5 or +0.5 you can see the pattern, but there are exceptions (some data falls above or below a perfect line).

(Math teachers - I swear I tried really hard, stats was my worst subject in grad school, please go easy on meeeee 😭)

OKAY BACK TO THE DATA

• There is a negative relationship between year published and percentage of the reviews being 5 stars (r = -.64, p = 0.008) -> older books have a higher percentage of 5 star ratings.
• But those newer books have more 4 and 3 star ratings than older books, so people aren't angry about these books and "review bombing" them with 1 or 2 stars, the books are just more "okay" (3 stars) or "good" (4 stars) than "great" (5 stars) -> 4 stars (r = +0.58, p = 0.019), 3 stars (r = +0.54, p = 0.030)
• The more popular a book is (in terms of total number of reviews) higher the percentage of 5 star reviews (r = +0.51, p = 0.042). I suspect one classic is driving this relationship, but if you want to take a guess at which one it is - feel free to guess if you want haha

Have a recommendation for this quest?? I wanna hear them all!! But please read this first!

As I mentioned in the Welcome & Introductions post - I'm keeping the specific criteria for this quest close to my chest until other similar quests drop and I don't want to potentially ruin the surprise! However, I will say this quest is multi-genre, so don't worry about trying to stay in a specific niche. If it feels like a fever dream (surreal, absurd, dreamlike), I would to know about it so I can consider it! Please be patient with me as I make my way through the recommendations!

You can suggest as many books as you like, but please submit one book per comment so other Boundlings can upvote the books they'd love to see on this quest tooo! Your comment should include the book title, author, and a link (or just the url) to the book's page on Pagebound so I know exactly which book to check out!

I looked up content warnings for this book right after starting and I saw that it includes graphic descriptions of rape. It'd be great if people who are farther along into the book or have already finished it could comment the chapters and maybe the first and last sentence before and after the sexual assault scene(s), so that I can mark them in my copy and skip them. Any help would be much appreciated, thank you! 🙏

I will also paste here a summary of the main content warnings for this book, which I found from 🔗the book's page on The Storygraph:

Graphic Death, Rape, Violence

Moderate Racial slurs, Racism, Suicide

Minor Cannibalism, Child death, Addiction

Take care of yourselves and happy reading, everyone!

(Edited to fix formatting)

This is going to be an interesting read post-Covid…