Enneagram book recommendations
I have a new video up where I read book recommendations based on my enneagram type from around the internet!
6 months ago in the early stages of planning for this video, 500+ people kindly granted me access to their goodreads favourites shelf and also provided me with their enneagram number. Here’s what I did with that information.
The idea of recommending someone a book solely based on feelings, and then them ending up not liking said recommended book—it’s truly my worst nightmare. I never want to be the reason that someone has a poor reading experience. This is why, though a staple in the booktube community, you will rarely find a recommendation video on my channel. What I like to lean toward more, is cold, hard facts.
Don’t get me wrong- I love seeing others’ recommendation lists; I respect the effort and research that I’m sure has gone into them, and I love making content around them (see here and here.) But in curating my own list, I wanted evidence.
A lot of books show up on virtually every favourites shelf I visited, regardless of enneagram type (I’m looking at you The Seven Husbands and Evelyn Hugo and The House in the Cerulean Sea!) which makes sense because they have both a high readership and high average ratings.
I wanted to find a slightly more niche readership, so I decided to only look at titles with an average 4 star or below rating. This way, while they still may be universally read, we know they are slightly less universally loved.
I started with a google sheets spread and a mouse with a now worn-out “right click” button, with “open link in new tab” becoming my new mantra as I spent my first afternoon opening the link to every single type 5 (by the far the quickest type to mass engage with my call out)‘s favourites list and began assembling my research.
Some trends were easy to recognize. Type 9s had The Time Machine (and many other time travel related books, mind you) on their favourites shelf 2-4x more than any other enneagram type. Done. Easy. But then came The Night Circus, which type 2 and type 4 were just as likely to have on their favourites shelf (approx. 10 from each type, from a sample size of at least 40). So the additional challenge was to then find out if any other readers within those two types had also read the book, but not given it 5 stars. And what was their rating? If not a five-star, type 2 was more likely to give out a two-star, and type 4 was more likely to have given the book a four-star. So it ended up in the type 4 list!
Once I had 4-5 books selected for each type, the cross referencing began. Ensuring that no other type had each respective book rated higher averagely than the type I had selected it for. I cannot get across to you how much time was put into this before you were able to see these quick, silly little graphics. Of course I initially planned to just go off of favourites shelves, but I was so committed to my cross referencing that I had to look at each individual person’s entire goodreads reading history anyway by the end.
So here are the curated recommendations. I take absolutely no responsibility for these lol.
And a few facts just for fun
Most likely to participate: Type 9 by a landslide. Followed by type 5 and type 2.
Least likely to participate: Type 7 and 8.
Most likely to have books with low average ratings on their favourites shelf: Type 6.
Least likely to have books with low average ratings on their favourites shelf: Type 3.
Reading taste that was the most compatible: type 4 + 8.
Reading taste that was the least compatible: type 3 + 9.
