What titles most shaped the site's
readers?
A few weeks ago, I started to see a viral status being passed around my Facebook friends.
“List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way,” it begins. “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.”
I’m usually a skeptic of such meme-y Facebook statuses, but people gathering around books that meant something to them melted even my cold heart. So I asked the Facebook Data Science team if this status had gotten “big” enough to attract their attention, and what they had seen in it.
They replied with something I wasn’t expecting: a list of the 20 books most cited by Facebook users who participated in the game.
In a new blog post, they’ve released that list and some of their methodology. The data science team analyzed more than 130,000 statuses, stripped them of their identifying information and looked for common strings—that is, shared snippets of text and title—and ranked them by popularity.
The final list is an interesting, somewhat intuitive list of of titles. There’s some fantasy on it, some contemporary fiction, some classics. It’s also also steeped in books that Americans typically encounter during adolescence, whether as a traditional school assignment (The Great Gatsby) or on their own, as a “young adult” novel (Harry Potter, etc.). Even before “young adult” literature was a thing, books were shaping young adults.
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