Harry Potter series tops Facebook 'book challenge'

NEW DELHI: Lately, thousands on Facebook have been sharing a list of Top 10 books that shaped them or stayed with them, with their friends. What they probably did not know, was that Facebook was listening in as well. The social media giant's data science team released their analysis of 1,30,000 status updates related to the book meme appearing in the last two weeks of August 2014.

Findings show that 63.7% of those participating in what has been called the "book challenge" were in the US, followed by 9.3% in India, and 6.3% in the UK. There were more women than men participating in the exercise, with a ratio of 3.1:1. The average age of the participants was 37.

Harry Potter came out tops, with 21.08 per cent mentioning it in their list. Surprisingly, the Holy Bible, the benchmark for measuring book sales, did not even make it to the top 5 when it came to readers' most favourite books. It finished at number 6, appearing in 7.21 per cent of the lists.

A fair number of books that made it to the top 10 had been made into films. "The books that tend to be made into films are the ones with the most resonant and timeless storytelling appeal, so there's bound to be some overlap," says writer and literary critic Nilanjana Roy.

Writer Anuja Chauhan says there can be more to the fact that nearly all the books among the top ten were made into films. "It seems like people are pretending to read books they haven't read. There is a pressure to make one's choices look intellectual. The real acid test of a book one really likes is re-reading it," says Chauhan, author of The Zoya Factor.

Roy says she'd give people the benefit of the doubt. "While they might have listed the more impressive of the books they'd read, they are also honest in listing books they genuinely loved," she says, pointing out that many of the books in Facebook's top 10 were from the fantasy genre. "We have a natural, gravitational pull towards that kind of storytelling, and perhaps that shows up much more in popular list-making exercises like this than it might in more curated lists," she says.

Here's a list of the top 15 books along with the percentage of lists they were mentioned in:

1. Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling - 21.08%

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 - 7.21%

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 - J.D. Salinger - 5.70%

10. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. 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 Bronte - 5.23%

15. The Stand - Stephen King - 5.11%