The Little Prince in Facebook’s users favourite books
For the past year, a meme has circulated around Facebook asking people to list the 10 books that have « stayed with [them] in some way ». It instructs people to share their lists with others and to invite their friends to do the same via their status updates. « Don’t take more than a few minutes and don’t think too hard, » read the instructions. « They do not have to be the ‘right’ books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way. »
Now two researchers, Lada Adamic and Pinkesh Patel, have analysed 130,000 of these updates to draw up a list of the most influential books among Facebook users. JK Rowling’s Harry Potter is the star of the show, with books from the series being mentioned in 21.08 per cent of lists. Children’s books are heavily represented, as are fantasy novels and classics, especially those which feature on school reading lists.
The average age of those posting was 37. The survey was drawn from Facebook users around the world: 63.7 per cent were in the US, followed by 9.3 per cent in India, and 6.3 per cent in the UK. Women outnumbered men by three to one.
1 Harry Potter series, JK Rowling (named in 21.08 per cent of lists)
2 To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (14.48%)
3 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (13.86%)
4 The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien (7.48%)
5 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (7.28%)
6 The Holy Bible (named in 7.21% of lists)
7 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (5.97%)
8 The Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins (5.82%)
9 The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger (5.7%)
10 The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis (5.63%)
11 The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald (5.61%)
12 1984, George Orwell (5.37%)
13 Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (5.26%)
14 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (5.23%)
15 The Stand, Stephen King (5.11%)
16 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (4.95%)
17 A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle (4.38%)
18 The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (4.27%)
19 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis (4.05%)
20 The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho (4.01%)
21 Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery (3.95%)
22 The Giver, Lois Lowry (3.88%)
23 The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (3.67%)
24 Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (3.53%)
25 The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (3.39%)
26 Lord of the Flies, William Golding (3.38%)
27 The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan (3.38%)
28 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (3.32%)
29 Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (3.26%)
30 Hamlet, William Shakespeare (3.22%)
31 The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery (3.21%)
32 Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (3.15%)
33 Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (3.15%)
34 Animal Farm, George Orwell (3.12%)
35 The Book of Mormon (3.08%)
36 The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank (3.05%)
37 Dune, Frank Herbert (3.02%)
38 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2.98%)
39 The Autobiography of Malcolm X (2.83%)
40 Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (2.78%)
41 The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein (2.72%)
42 The Fault in Our Stars, John Green (2.68%)
43 On the Road, Jack Kerouac (2.68%)
44 Lamb, Christopher Moore (2.58%)
45 Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut (2.54%)
46 A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (2.53%)
47 Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (2.52%)
48 The Help, Kathryn Stockett (2.45%)
49 The Outsiders, SE Hinton (2.44%)
50 American Gods, Neil Gaiman (2.42%)
51 Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls (2.41%)
52 Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein (2.39%)
53 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett (2.38%)
54 Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder (2.35%)
55 The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (2.31%)
56 Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett (2.31%)
57 The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2.29%)
58 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (2.24%)
59 A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (2.21%)
60 Les Miserables, Victor Hugo (2.21%)
61 Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (2.16%)
62 Night, Elie Wiesel (2.12%)
63 The Dark Tower Series, Stephen King (2.12%)
64 Outlander, Diana Gabaldon (2.07%)
65 The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1.92%)
66 A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini (1.89%)
67 The Art of War, Sun Tzu (1.88%)
68 Catch 22, Joseph Heller (1.85)
69 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1.85%)
70 The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky (1.83%)
71 The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1.78%)
72 Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden (1.76%)
73 Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom (1.75%)
74 The Road, Cormac McCarthy (1.73%)
75 Watership Down, Richard Adams (1.72%)
76 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith (1.72%)
77 Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein (1.68%)
78 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson (1.65%)
79 A Song of Ice and Fire, George RR Martin (1.65%)
80 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume (1.65%)
81 Charlotte’s Web, EB White (1.64%)
82 The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger (1.63%)
83 Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1.62%)
84 Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1.62%)
85 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1.61%)
86 The Shack, William P Young (1.58%)
87 Watchmen, Alan Moore (1.56%)
88 Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice (1.55%)
89 The Odyssey, Homer (1.54%)
90 The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende (1.54%)
91 The Stranger, Albert Camus (1.53%)
92 Call of the Wild, Jack London (1.52%)
93 The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom (1.51%)
94 Siddhartha, Herman Hesse (1.51%)
95 East of Eden, John Steinbeck (1.50%)
96 Matilda, Roald Dahl (1.50%)
97 The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1.49%)
98 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig (1.47%)
99 Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Gárcia Márquez (1.45%)
100 Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak (1.45%)