“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all”*…
Facebook has analyzed its well-known meme, “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. They do not have to be the ‘right’ books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.”
It gathered an anonymized sample of over 130,000 status updates matching “10 books” or “ten books” appearing in the last two weeks of August 2014 (although the meme has been active over at least a year). 63.7% of the posters were in the US, followed by 9.3%in India, and 6.3% in the UK. Women outnumbered men 3.1:1. The average age was 37.
Here are the top 20 books, along with a percentage of all lists (having at least one of the top 500 books) that contained them.
- 21.08 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
- 14.48 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- 13.86 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
- 7.48 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
- 7.28 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- 7.21 The Holy Bible
- 5.97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
- 5.82 The Hunger Games Trilogy – Suzanne Collins
- 5.70 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
- 5.63 The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
- 5.61 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- 5.37 1984 – George Orwell
- 5.26 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
- 5.23 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- 5.11 The Stand – Stephen King
- 4.95 Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- 4.38 A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
- 4.27 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
- 4.05 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
- 4.01 The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
Read more here. And see how the same list varied in non-English-speaking areas here (spoiler alert: Harry Potter still rules…).
* Oscar Wilde
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As we turn the page, we might send leather-bound birthday wishes to poet, iconic bad boy (and, as readers will recall, father of the redoubtable Ada Lovelace) George Gordon, Lord Byron; he was was born on this date in 1788. Byron once famously suggested that “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.” Still, history suggests, even then…
