The dying art of reading books!

Well of course I had to go through it and see: I've read 27% of them, nothing to brag about.

Some (like Madame Bovary and To the Lighthouse) I was required to read for literature courses, some (Golding, Orwell, Huxley, Tolkien, Lewis, Vonnegut, Pullman) because I'm a sci-fi/fantasy buff, some (Passage to India, Kim) because they were furnished to us Peace Corps volunteers as part of our kit (which also, thankfully, included Moby Dick & Don Quixote, oddly omitted from this list), for some I've read other books by them, not the ones listed (Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dreiser) and some that everyone is "supposed to have read" (Dante, Rushdie, Updike, Roth) I admit I haven't.  

In upper level Poli Sci courses we read fat anthologies of "primary course readings" that included extensive excerpts from numbers 29 thru 33 (Rousseau, Marx, Machiavelli, Augustine, Hobbes), but I didn't count them. 

Finally, two I can highly recommend are 14 & 17, Things Fall Apart and A Hundred Years of Solitude. 

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Skryja, David

To: Reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2009 9:52 PM

Subject: [Reason-Omaha] Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

http://www.newsweek.com/id/204478  

Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

Declaring the best book ever written is tricky business. Who's to say what the best is? We went one step further: we crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John's College reading list, Oprah's, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time. It's a list of lists — a meta-list. Let the debate begin.

Meta-List:  http://www.newsweek.com/id/204478  

A Note on Methodology

How We Compiled NEWSWEEK's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Jun 29, 2009

Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

Inside NEWSWEEK's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

 

We began by selecting 10 separate lists of best books that we thought represented an eclectic mix of readers' tastes, not just a narrow Great Books of the Western World canon. To be considered, the list had to be of books that were either originally written in English or books that had been translated into English. The lists we selected range from the highly erudite (the St. John's College reading list) to the much more accessible (Oprah's Book Club and Wikipedia's list of the bestselling books of all time). Some of the lists only featured novels, while others included a mix of fiction and nonfiction. Some contained only 20th-century works, while others reached all the way back to the beginnings of Western civilization. Our goal was to take into consideration a range of factors—including a book's impact on history, intellectual contribution to our culture, modern relevance, and enduring popularity. It was meant not to be a comprehensive list of the best books ever, but rather a reflection of the passions and judgments of smart readers and critics of our time. 

The complete list of 10 previously published lists that we drew upon includes The Telegraph’s 110 best books/The Perfect Library, The Guardian’s top 100 books, Oprah’s Book Club, the St. John’s College reading list,Wikipedia’s list of all-time bestsellers, the New York Public Library’s books of the century, the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, The Modern Library’s 100 best novels and 100 best works of nonfiction, Time’s 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present, and NEWSWEEK’s own list of current top 50 choices, which is being published this week.

Once all the lists were selected and the titles entered into a database, we devised a weighting system so that each individual title would be scored equally, no matter whether it came from a long list or a short list, a list of only fiction or a mix of genres, or whether the list included only books written in the 20th century or titles that went back much further in time. The weighting adjusted for these individual differences between lists. In the final result, the book with the highest combined score is ranked No. 1 on our list, the second is ranked No. 2, and so on down the list. In the case of ties—of which there were many—we broke the tie by awarding the higher ranking to the book returning the greater number of Google results, when a search was done by author and title.

In our meta-ranking, we note which books were recommended on which list or lists. If you click through to the individual lists, you'll see where each book falls on that respective list (although some of the book lists from which we drew were not ranked in order and some were, which we took into consideration in assigning each book a rank).

Peter W. Bernstein, Annalyn Swan (ASAP Media)
Statistical Analysis: Courtney Kennedy
Research: Emmelyn Stevens

ASAP Media, founded in 2003 by longtime editors Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan, specializes in creating books and magazine special issues. The company has also worked extensively on internet development.

The list:  http://www.newsweek.com/id/204478