Yesterday, I blogged about ten meaningful / memorable / impactful books in my life (https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2014/09/09/tagged-for-ten-books.html), having been tagged for it by +DeAnna Knippling.
Apparently this meme's been floating around a bit, and Facebook did some analytics on the results, published a few days ago. Here are the top 20:
1. Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
2. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
3. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
4. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
5. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
6. The Holy Bible
7. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
8. The Hunger Games Trilogy – Suzanne Collins
9. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
10. The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
11. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. 1984 – George Orwell
13. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
14. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
15. The Stand – Stephen King
16. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
17. A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L'Engle
18. The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
19. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
20. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
There are a surprisingly large number of "classics" on the list. Three of the ones I picked (Lord of the Rings, 1984, the Bible) showed up here.
It's also indicative of some of the data clustering issues FB had — in this case, despite supposedly aggregating series, they still listed out The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardobe and The Chronicles of Narnia separately.
There are some other fun analytics they've done, including proximity maps (people who liked X also tended to like Y) and connections between people doing the meme, as well as the full top 100 list (I'm vaguely pleased that none of them made me kick myself for forgetting that one). Good stuff.
Books that have stayed with us
by Lada Adamic and Pinkesh Patel. Favorite books are something friends like to share and discuss. A Facebook meme facilitates this very interaction. You may have seen one of your friends post something like “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, …
My old karate teacher went off about the Harry Potter stuff at one point. "This generation's Star Wars." I guess so.