One of my all-time favourite books is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so for this assignment I wanted to discover books that could be considered similar to it (beyond other works by Junot Diaz). I used Booklamp to see if it'd be as successful as Pandora has been for my music tastes. The results weren't as desired, but they yielded some interesting observations.

Booklamp uses a method focused on both the language of the book and a thematic breakdown, or StoryDNA. When I ran the search for Oscar Wao, this is came up as its language and StoryDNA breakdown:

Much to my surprise, one of the elements that are most salient from this book, and Diaz's style in general, the liberal use of Spanish and Spanglish, nearly disappears in this breakdown. Notice how the use of a foreign language is included as a factor of Story, not language, and then it only considers Spanish (I'm assuming words that are in Spanish but not in English). Out of all the reading suggestions, only one included the same Story factor of Spanish: 

The suggestions provided by Booklamp, then, were more focused on the way the book was written (motion and description) and the themes of extended family and explicit language/anger. I guess once I get to them, I'll notice whether focusing on these aspects provides a similar experience as reading Oscar Wao.

However, another peculiar characteristic with Oscar Wao's breakdown comes from the fact that the Foreign Language/Spanish theme is so small. I figured there would be books in the Booklamp that were completely in Spanish, but a few searches later I realized it had no books by notable authors in Spanish (Garcia Marquez, Paz, Esquivel, Vargas Llosa). Instead, searching for books with the highest Foreign Language/Spanish component yields as top results the Spanish translations of (plenty of) self-help books by Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen  --books whose Spanish content is incidental, and in no way thematic. 

I decided to further question this Spanish content marker by running a quick Wordle on my PDF version of the book. After deleting the most prominent word (it's Oscar), this is the result:

Notice how two of the most used words are "didn" and "wasn", markers that are meant to denote an Hispanic accent, and "la", which is in the wordle because it's not a common English word --as in the musical note-- but in this book is mostly used as the Spanish article for a female noun. My guess is Booklamp's criteria for Foreign Language/Spanish doesn't consider this and instead, like Wordle, reads it as the musical note. This was just a brief experiment, but I think it neatly illustrates some of the kinks in text analysis tools, and the complications that mixed language texts bring.