In addition to videos of your friends completing the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, you've probably noticed another trend taking over your Facebook News Feed: "books that have stayed with me." The trend has taken off in the past couple of weeks with users posting the 10 books that have stayed with them the most in their lives.
Some of the most popular titles seen on Facebook include The "Harry Potter" series by J.K. Rowling, "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris and "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, just to name a few. The books don't have to be your favorite or the best or anything like that. They just have to be the ones that have had the most impact on your life.
So with the popularity of this trend, it begs the question: Which books have influenced Facebook users the most? The Atlantic inquired about the fad to the Facebook Data Science team, and it released some data on the books appearing in these statuses, coming up with the top 100 books and the percentage of time they appeared in a status.
Here are the top 20 books along with their percentages:
1. The "Harry Potter" series by J.K. Rowling (21.08 percent)
2. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (14.48 percent)
3. "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien (13.86 percent)
4. "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien (7.48 percent)
5. "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen (7.28 percent)
6. The Holy Bible (7.21 percent)
7. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams (5.97 percent)
8. "The Hunger Games" Trilogy by Suzanne Collins (5.82 percent)
9. "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger (5.70 percent)
10. "The Chronicles of Narnia" by C.S. Lewis (5.63 percent)
11. "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (5.61 percent)
12. "1984" by George Orwell (5.37 percent)
13. "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott (5.26 percent)
14. "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte (5.23 percent)
15. "The Stand" by Stephen King (5.11 percent)
16. "Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell (4.95 percent)
17. "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle (4.38 percent)
18. "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood (4.27 percent)
19. "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis (4.05 percent)
20. "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho (4.01 percent)
The Facebook Data Science team used anonymous, aggregate data to achieve these results. The team gathered 130,000 statuses that included the words "10 books" or "ten books" during the last two weeks of August 2014. The demographics of the results were 63.7 percent American, 9.3 percent Indian and 6.3 percent British. The majority of status updates came from women, and the average age of users in the data was 37.
The results of the Facebook Data Science team's analysis aren't really that surprising. It makes sense that children's books, which are often very influential in shaping a person, and classic novels, which are widely read, would make the cut. What is interesting is that all of the books in the top 20 list are novels, not including the Bible. Although there are plenty of popular non-fiction books out there, it seems that the ones that have stayed with readers the most are those that let them escape reality.
The team also computed how many titles were shared among lists linked by tags of Facebook friends. They found that Facebook friends only share 0.4 books in common on average, compared to an average of 0.1 books shared between two random lists.
You can check out the blog post from the Facebook Data Science team here, which includes the full list of the 100 books that have stayed with Facebook users and some nifty illustrations of the data as a network. Happy reading!
