Should Twilight be among the books that everyone should read? It is according to this infographic by David McCandless of great books (according to popular surveys):
Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics? I scraped the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100's. Both popular and high-brow. They included all Pulitzer Prize winners, Desert Island Discs choices from recent years, Oprah's Bookclub list, and, of course, The Guardian's Top 100 Books of All Time. A simple frequency analysis on the gathered titles gives us a neat 'consensus cloud' visualisation of the most mentioned books titles across the polls. Do you agree with the consensus?
You can view a much larger version of this image at the link. My wife (a big reader) and I were just discussing this cloud, and she suggests that the list be narrowed to To Kill a Mockingbird and Nineteen Eighty-Four -- and to add King Lear, though it is not a novel. What would you add or remove from this cloud?
Link via GeekDad
I can't see Hyperion by Dan Simmons on there, but it's the best science fiction I've ever read.
Oh yeah, it is a word cloud, so it is pretty
I was excited to see Ender's Game on the list. I had never even heard of the book until senior year of high school, when my physics teacher made it required reading for the class. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed a science fiction novel, and it really taught me not to completely avoid the genre.
And while Twilight is on here, at least it's small- the same size as Foundation. Even if I don't see as many people on "Team Hari Seldon" as "Team Edward" or "Team Jacob."
A tiny book written by a Frenchman, Fredrick Basitat, around Abe Lincoln's time. If this doesn't teach the real reasoning behind politics I don't know what does. Not until I read that did I fully understand it. Eye awakening in the truth of it. It is amazing they had the time to discuss all this stuff in such clarity way back when.
Kay Sea