The Top 100 Books From the #BookBucketChallenge on Facebook

Of late, there are a number of challenges that are trending on Facebook from past few weeks now. Started with the #Icebucketchallenge, now there are over ten’s of challenges for which people are nominating their friends to take up. Challenges like the #BookBucketchallenge, #Ricebucketchallenge, #thepicturechallenge, thefoodlistchallenge, etc are the ones which you might be seeing on your timelines these days.

After Icebucketchallenge and Ricebucketchallenge the challenge which has now gain huge momentum is the #BookBucketChallenge.

You may have seen one of your friends post something like

List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. 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.

To figure out which books are the most popular among people and have stayed for long, recently, Facebook analyzed more than 130,000 status updates matching “10 books” or “ten books” appearing in the last two weeks of August 2014.

The demographics of those posting were: 63.7% were in the US, 9.3% in India, and 6.3% in the UK. Women outnumbered men by the ratio of 3.1:1. The average age was 37.

It programmatically segmented the posts into lists, and found the most frequently occurring substrings, which corresponded to different books, e.g. “Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy”. However, the same book could appear as different substrings: e.g. just “Anna Karenina” or “Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy”. It clustered similar variants programmatically, hand tuning where the algorithm had failed to merge two popular variants. It then used the clusters to automatically match the book lists against the common variants of the top 500 most popular books.

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Here are the 100 books that took the top seat along with their percentages:

21.08 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
14.48 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
13.86 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
7.48 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
7.28 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
7.21 The Holy Bible
5.97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
5.82 The Hunger Games Trilogy – Suzanne Collins
5.70 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
5.63 The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
5.61 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
5.37 1984 – George Orwell
5.26 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
5.23 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
5.11 The Stand – Stephen King
4.95 Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
4.38 A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
4.27 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
4.05 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
4.01 The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
3.95 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
3.88 The Giver – Lois Lowry
3.67 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
3.53 Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
3.39 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
3.38 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
3.38 The Eye of the World – Robert Jordan
3.32 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
3.26 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
3.22 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
3.21 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
3.15 Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3.15 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
3.12 Animal Farm – George Orwell
3.08 The Book of Mormon
3.05 The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank
3.02 Dune – Frank Herbert
2.98 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2.83 The Autobiography of Malcolm X
2.78 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
2.72 The Giving Tree – Shel Silverstein
2.68 The Fault in Our Stars – John Green
2.68 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
2.58 Lamb – Christopher Moore
2.54 Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
2.53 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
2.52 Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
2.45 The Help – Kathryn Stockett
2.44 The Outsiders – S.E. Hinton
2.42 American Gods – Neil Gaiman
2.41 Where the Red Fern Grows – Wilson Rawls
2.39 Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
2.38 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
2.35 Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
2.31 The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
2.31 Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
2.29 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
2.24 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
2.21 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
2.21 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
2.16 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
2.12 Night – Elie Wiesel
2.12 The Dark Tower Series – Stephen King
2.07 Outlander – Diana Gabaldon
1.92 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
1.89 A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
1.88 The Art of War – Sun Tzu
1.85 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
1.85 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
1.83 The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
1.78 The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
1.76 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
1.75 Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom
1.73 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
1.72 Watership Down – Richard Adams
1.72 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
1.68 Where the Sidewalk Ends – Shel Silverstein
1.65 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
1.65 A Song of Ice and Fire – George R. R. Martin
1.65 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume
1.64 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
1.63 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
1.62 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
1.62 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1.61 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
1.58 The Shack – William P. Young
1.56 Watchmen – Alan Moore
1.55 Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
1.54 The Odyssey – Homer
1.54 The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
1.53 The Stranger – Albert Camus
1.52 Call of the Wild – Jack London
1.51 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
1.51 Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
1.50 East of Eden – John Steinbeck
1.50 Matilda – Roald Dahl
1.49 The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
1.47 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig
1.45 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1.45 Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sendak

It also created this neat graphic showing the connections among the books: “In the network visualization, each node represents a book, sized by the frequency with which it was mentioned, as an edge represents an unusual number of co-occurrences of the two books in the lists.”

As per the report, most friends who like to read, have mutual books as their favorites. Even if the book is uncommon. Even “People who listed X also listed Y”, said Facebook. They have an inclination towards the same genre of writings. The ones who read The Monk who sold his Ferrari also quoted the Autobiography of a Yogi. The startup guy who likes the Lean startup also likes The Startup Game.

The sudden celebration on Facebook, took people back to the mindset in which they had read these book. People listed all sorts of stories, from The Handmaid’s Tale to Anne of Green Gables. A diverse range of books were listed by them.

The Book Bucket Challenge is a drive started by One Library per Village, an NGO based in Kerala.

Did Your Favourite Book Make It To The Top Of The #BookBucketChallenge?