From the Guardian...
Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics? I scraped the results of over [sic] 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? [more]
Well, this is rather a mixed bag. Let's see... The Hitchkiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes in over War and Peace and Do Androids Dram ofelectric Sheep. His Dark Materials is about on par with Remembrance of Things Past. To Kill a Mockingbird leads Harry Potter and Harry Potter leads Scoop, The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Atlas Shrugged, The Wind and the Willows, Twilight and Persuasion. --Wow. Where does one even start with this? On the one hand, I'm amazed, in positive and negative ways that some of these titles are on the list at all. On the other hand, I see the residue of popular culture, High School / College reading lists and, my favorite category, "more honored in the breach than in the observance."
