Month: February 2013

Kindle Magazines FYI

Last year I started subscribing to several magazines at the Kindle Newsstand and read them on my iPad.  For $1.99 or $2.99 a month, it’s very easy to try out a magazine.  Then towards the end of the year I realized I wasn’t reading these magazines and cancelled my subscriptions.  I figured I’d wait until I had time to read, then go through the back issues and decide if I really wanted to subscribe again.  Well, today I went to look at some of the back issues and they wouldn’t download.  I got a message “License Limit Reached.”

At first this message seem to imply that I had too many registered devices.  I have two iPod touches, two e-ink Kindles, one iPad, one Kindle cloud reader, and six different PC readers.  I deregistered everything but one touch, two Kindles and one iPad.  Still got the message.  So I called Amazon.  The first lady I talked to was very nice, but she eventually bumped me up a service level.  The second lady knew exactly what my problem was.  If you cancel your subscription, but haven’t downloaded the magazines you bought to a device yet, you will get the license limit reached error.

I told her I felt I had bought those magazines and assumed I’d always have them.  She said unfortunately, that’s not how the system works with the licensing agreement they have with the magazines.  I didn’t think that was right, but the lady I was talking with was very nice, and I assumed she was stuck with this policy, so it wasn’t Amazon’s fault.  The helpdesk lady did apologize and gave me a token credit.

FYI:  always download your magazines from the cloud to your devices before you cancel your subscription.    And I noticed that I didn’t have this problem with my old issues of The Rolling Stone Magazine.  I had just re-subscribed to it.  But then I couldn’t remember I had previously downloaded all those issues.  So just for kicks, I re-subscribed to The New York Review of Books, and viola, my old issues were again available to download.

rollingstone

Crazy Subscription Pricing

I read on the iPad with the Kindle reader to save trees.  It just ecological.  Also, you can try a magazine without buying a whole year’s worth.  Most magazines at the Kindle Newsstand are available for a monthly fee.  But pricing is crazy.

Yesterday, at my favorite bookstore, I saw an issue of The Rolling Stone Magazine I wanted to read.  It was $4.99, plus tax at the book store.  It’s $1.99 a month at Amazon, which means I get 2 issues for $1.99, a savings of $8 over the newsstand price of two issues.  26 issues is $19.97 a year via a paper subscription – or 77 cents an issue.  So I’m paying Amazon $23.88 a year for the electronic version, or 92 cents an issue.

So the cheapest way to get The Rolling Stone is to buy the paper copy and have them mail it to you.  How is that even possible?  I’m paying them $4 a year more not to print the magazine and mail it to me.  Not only that, but if I subscribed to the paper copy I’d be eligible to read the entire archive of back issues online.  This is a conundrum for me.  I want to be ecological.  A lot of carbon goes into printing and mailing, and that makes me feel guilty about the physical copy subscription.  But for $4 less money I’d get the digital archive!  That’s so tempting.

You’d think they’d charge less for the Kindle edition because there’s no printing or postal costs.  Maybe Amazon’s cut requires the increase, yet Amazon also sells the paper subscriptions for $19.97, just two cents more than Rolling Stones does with it’s fall out cards in the mag.

The New York Review of Books is $41.88 yearly at the Kindle Newsstand at $3.49 a month, but it’s $69.00 a year at their site, or $74.95 a year for the paper and online edition. So Amazon is a bargain, except once again I don’t get access to the digital archive.  I’d rather pay less and read The New York Review of Books on my iPad, but I sure would love access to the digital archive.

The Future of Magazine

It seems obvious that we’re moving toward a digital future.  Why waste all that money on printing and postage when magazines can be instantly delivered.  To me the perfect magazine subscription would be the cheapest with the least commitment, along with access to the entire archive of the magazine’s history.  I’m willing to pay a monthly fee for new and old.  What I’d really love is paying a monthly fee like Netflix’s and get access to a bunch of magazines.  Next Issue does offer such a service now for $10-15 a month, but they don’t have the magazines I want to read.  It’s like cable TV, 200 channels and nothing to watch.  I’m currently subscribing to two magazines that totals $5.48 a month.  If The Rolling Stone and The New York Review of Books were available at Next Issue along with 1-2 other magazines I wanted, then $10 a month would be a good deal.  I’d need 5-6 magazines I really wanted to make it worth $15 a month.  I’ll keep my eye out on Next Issue, but for now it seems weight towards women’s magazines.

JWH – 2/24/13

Why Can’t We Be Good When We Know What’s Bad?

I’ve been reading about how our western diet is spreading around the world and bringing obesity, diabetes, hypertension and a host of other non-infectious degenerative diseases to people who used to eat differently, and lived healthier.  It’s quite obvious that our high fat, high sugar, high salt, high calorie diets are bad, so why don’t we eat better?  Why can’t we be good when we know what’s bad?

We just can’t seem to resist sweet, salty and fatty foods when they are in abundance.  Generally, where humans are thinner, more active, with little diabetes and hypertension its because they didn’t have a whole lot of food choices to begin with.  The western diet is really one of abundance and variety, and people around the world if given the opportunity to eat like us, become pigs like us.

My question is:  Why can’t we say no?

I have no answer.  I weigh 240 pounds.  I certainly can’t say no.

Actually, that’s not completely true.  I’ve given up many favorite foods over the years, and I still gained weight.  I do eat healthier, but I don’t eat less.  I am driven by hunger.  I can’t say yes to being hungry.

I keep eating more than I should knowing that I will suffer degenerative diseases in the future.  That’s insane.

I find this philosophically fascinating.  Obviously the rational mind has little influence over the physical body and the hormones that regulate it.

What if science could create a pill that makes us shun desserts, fatty foods, fried foods, salty foods, etc., and made us crave just the right amount of healthy foods, would you take that pill?  What if this pill made food a non-issue, so you just ate exactly what your body needed to be healthy.  Would you take that pill?  It might kill off gourmet eating, fast food, candy, pastries, soft drinks, and all the other stuff we so love.

Yeah I know, you’re thinking, “Why can’t what’s bad be good?”  See that opens up another philosophical question.  What if bad food is what we want.  What if bad food is what makes life good?   That’s easy to believe, but remember the heart disease and diabetes?  Remember all the obese children and young adults?  Brownies and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream are evil.

What if our current stage of humanity is a paradigm shift like going from hunter and gatherers to an agricultural society?  Humans have always pretty much eaten anything they could put in our mouths that didn’t kill us.  That’s why we’re called omnivores.  But what if we’re moving into a new phase of existence where we must become healthyvores?  Can our species make the transition?  If I had a time machine and could jump ahead a hundred years, or five hundred years, would I find homo sapiens 2.0 living a much longer and healthier life?

I don’t know.  It’s something to think about.  I’m not sure we can always change, to always evolve.

JWH – 2/18/13

Spending a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Ripping LPs with Audacity

Sometimes, it’s just pleasant to to putter around the house, doing small tasks.  Getting little jobs done, checking them off the To Do List, provides a nice sense of accomplishment.  One task I’m working on this afternoon is recording LPs to MP3 files.  My goal is to hear my album music on Amazon Cloud Player.  I’ve recorded some favorite albums before, but it wasn’t until I discovered a long forgotten album, On the Flip Side, by Ricky Nelson lurking among my Amazon Cloud Player albums that I realized how much I appreciated having my vinyl on the Internet.

The Internet is such an odd driving social force.  It make us want everything at our fingertips.  For decades I only had once place to play my music.  As a kid, it was in my bedroom, but after I got married, it was my living room.  Now I can listen to a lifetime of music anywhere I have network access.  When I got back into LPs I found I enjoyed the old ritual of playing albums on my stereo system.  That was very satisfying.  Shopping for albums and having friends come over and listening to records was very retro, very nostalgic.

Alas, the modern world is so relentless.  In recent months, the time I play music the most is between 4am and 6am, when I have a bout of insomnia.  Pretty funny huh?  Strange time to rock out, but surprisingly, it’s a good way to start the day, or even to add a soundtrack to those early morning dreams if I’m lucky enough to drift back to sleep.

I keep my iPod touch and a pair of headphones by the chair I sleep in.  (Long story, but I sleep in a chair.)  If I wake up early, or stay up late and can’t get to sleep I call up some tunes.  Either from my favorite playlists on Rdio, or from the Amazon Cloud Music Player.  Being in a semiconscious state is a wonderful time to listen to music.  Sometimes I fall back asleep and even wake up again floating weightless in a sphere of music.  Pretty damn cool.

Learning to convert LPs, or even cassettes,  to MP3 files is not that hard.  Audacity is a free software program that works on PC, Mac and Linux.  The trick is to get your turntable connected to the computer.  You can even buy turntables designed for working with computers.  Older turntables require a preamp.  You can buy cheap ones for under $20, or spend a fortune if you’re a audiophile.  Newer turntables have a built-in preamp, and the latest turntables are specifically designed to work with computers by having a USB jack and cable.

I set up an old turntable on my desk that allows me to play LPs through my computer speakers while I work.  When I want to record an album, I just launch Audacity.  You also to get LAME to export to MP3, an auxiliary program, but it’s free.  The export feature on Audacity will link you to it.   All this can be a bit technical to get going, and instead of me going through all the steps I’m just going to link you to some very fine tutorials.  Just remember, the setting for bit rate is in the File|Export menu that calls up LAME.  I use 256 kbps.  LAME’s default is 128 kbps.

Here’s a video tutorial where the guy is using his receiver for the preamp.  The setup is much simpler if you have a turntable with a built-in preamp, or USB output.

I bought a preamp from Amazon for my old turntable.  It looks like this and is currently $17.14.

preamp

The sound quality would be superior if I used a superior preamp or good receiver, but I find this little cheap gadget works well enough for me.

The simplest setup is a turntable with USB and a laptop.  Next easiest is a turntable with built-in preamp.  You’ll need an adapter with 2 RCA inputs that converts to a mini stereo jack that plugs into your line-in.  After that involves adding a portable preamp like I did.  After that, you can use an existing receiver using your tape out RCA jacks to mini stereo jack.

I’m a lazy LP recorder.  I record a whole side and end up with two MP3 tracks for each albums.  Side 1 – Album Name, Side 2 – Album name.  I store these in My Music folder, under a folder named for the artist, and then another folder named after the album.  If you want to record each song separately, you can record the entire album, using pause between sides, and then use Audacity’s editing feature to pull out each song and export it separately with the track name.  Some people get very fancy and save the recording as WAV files, and then burn a CD.  As you learn and play with Audacity you’ll see all kinds of possibilities.

I also use a similar setup with a tape deck to convert old audiobooks to MP3.

After a recording session, I run the file upload program for the Amazon Cloud Player and my songs are added to my library.  Tomorrow, in the middle of the night, I can call them up.

Audacity is fun to play with.  Think of it as a word processor for sound.  If you have a microphone you can even record and edit your own speeches, or if you have a digital sound recorder, interview people and later edit the files.  I’ve helped people who do oral history to clean up their files.  Audacity does take a bit of learning, but isn’t that hard.  I helped a 70 year old lady who was very computer phobic use Audacity because she had about twenty hours of interviews with a man who constantly cough.  Audacity let her take out all the coughs, and clean off the white noise that was in the background.  Her final product was published as an oral history without the constant cough and annoying background noise.

I don’t buy many LPs anymore, just the ones that aren’t available on CD.  I use MusicStack.com to find out of print LPs, like the 1971 LP Never Goin’ Back to Georgia by The Blue Magoos.  Audacity can look intimidating, but it doesn’t take too long to learn.  It can be annoying if you can’t easily configure it to your computer.  Most of the time the default install finds your soundcard and speakers and everything is copacetic.  If you have a motherboard soundcard and an added PCIe soundcard, you might need to select the right device.

The Audacity interface looks like this:

audacity-screen

Depending on your level of audio fanaticism, you can use Audacity to clean off pops and hiss.  I’m lazy.  My recordings sound like I’m playing an album, and that doesn’t bother me.  I does seem like a minor miracle to put an album on, record it, and then play it by clicking on a file name.

Like I said at the top of the page, I like puttering around with little jobs.  I like scanning photos to .jpg, or scanning old documents to .pdf.  I like organizing my files into filing systems.  I like recording LPs and cassette audio books.  Slowly all my life is ending up in Dropbox.

JWH – 2/17/13

Books That Show Us Reality–The Power of the Red Pill

We live in strange times. 

Science is under attack by the faithful.  Most people prefer fiction over fact.  We know more about the nature of reality than ever before, yet few people want to look reality in the eye.  Everyone claims they want to know the truth, but do they?

It’s like in the movie The Matrix, when Neo is offered the red and blue pill.  Morpheus tells Neo the red pill will show him the truth and the blue pill will return him to forgetfulness.  On this planet, most people take the blue pill.

What if you wanted to take the red pill? 

Naturally, a red pill to reveal the truth does not exist.  But there are read pills, called books, that do.

Reality-bites

Up until the middle of the 20th century, an exemplary education involved the knowledge of the great books of the western world.  For the last fifty years we have been rejecting the great books kind of education, but we haven’t substitute a new canon.  A well educated person no longer has to know Greek, Latin and French, or the defining books of the classical world.  Science started in the 17th century, got up to speed in the 19th, and launched into orbit in the 20th. 

Yet few inhabitants of planet Earth embrace scientific thinking.  Fear of oblivion push many into the opium of religion, and most of the rest hide out in escapists fantasies and games.  Science is the only path to the truth, but few follow it.

What we need is a new set of great books, a new canon, whose content will define a well educated person.

I want to create a new definition of education.  Let’s start with a cockroach.  When you go into your kitchen in the middle of the night and turn on the light and see a cockroach run for his life, think about what it knows.  Think about what reality is to a cockroach.  The poor little fella knows nothing of physics, biology, history, mathematics, literature, or even language.  He has no tools to describe or analyze reality.  He’s a tiny little machine with sensors that help him search out food.  He also has a sensor that tells him to run for cover when the light goes on.  He doesn’t know your foot is about to squash his little body.  His awareness of reality is without thoughts.  His potential for education is nil.

Now, lets step up to a border collie.  Her awareness of reality is far richer than the poor cockroach.  We’re not sure if dogs think or have a language, although recently scientists claim that dogs can learn a couple hundred words, but they don’t perceive words like we do.  Our border collie is well adapted to education and can be trained to do all kinds of work and tricks.  She is even eager to learn.  But alas, she knows no more of physics, biology, history, mathematics, literature than our friend the cockroach.

We all approach reality like the blind men caressing separate parts of an elephant and speculating about the whole animal.  Some creatures can perceive more of reality than others.  Educated humans with all our senses are able to see the elephant complete in many dimensions,  even all its component molecule and atoms, and even trace its origin in its evolutionary past.  We see a lot of reality, but far from all – and nothing blocks us from seeing further.

Cosmologists see the largest aspects of reality.  Particle physicists see the smallest parts of reality.  Yet neither see the ultimate largest or smallest.  Our universe is probably one of an infinity of universes, so there is no end to big, and probably there is no end to small either.

Science has turned on the light, and scurrying humans can see it all, from immensely tiny particles to the furthest reaches of the universe, from the Big Bang until now.  Yet most people choose to hide in the cracks of darkness.

On a recent PBS show NOVA, “Earth From Space” they showed a map of the US with a squiggly ling running from New York to Los Angeles to represent the size of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The scientist interviewed explained the visual part of the spectrum we use to see would be about the size of a dime.  We have built new senses to see all of reality, we are way beyond biology.  We are now cyborgs.  But for the average human, there is little knowledge of our true capabilities.

spectrum

My definition of education is learning to see as much of reality as possible.  Unfortunately, most homo sapiens hide from reality, lost in their fantasies of religion, desires, fictional diversions, games, routines, habits, impulses, etc.  We are closer to the cockroach when we spend so much time pursuing food and sex.  We are like the border collie when we learn to work and earn a living.  But we are the most human when we’re examining the scope of existence.

Now to the great books.  Books are a tool like the telescope, microscope, or interplanetary robot, they let us see further.  If we read the right book, we’ll add details to our personal model of reality. We never see reality directly, but model it in our minds.  Tragically, humans are prone to delusions and fantasies that distort their models of reality.  Think of the wretched conspiracy theorist who builds highly distorted views of reality, or the faithful who shape reality by ancient Bible stories that pander to their fear of oblivion by promising eternal life.

Yes, it’s easier to take the blue pill and forget.  Taking the red pill requires a lot of study and work.

A great education is developing an internal model of reality that closely mimics our external reality.  A great education is learning about all the models of reality that failed.  Plato’s model of reality is abysmally wrong, yet we still study Plato.  Science is a long history of getting it wrong, but it’s cumulative history is a collection of good working models.  The theory of evolution is one of the most successful models of reality ever imagined.  Evolution is now the key tool for understanding how reality works.  Evolution explains change, and reality is constantly changing.

It’s time to get to the nitty gritty of this essay. 

What books are the red pill for showing the truth about reality?  My knowledge and experience is limited, so I can only make a crude guess.  What I’d like to see a collective development of a canon of great science books.   The Scientific Canon needs a small set of introductory books that will illuminate the uninitiated into the world of science.  Then it will need a more extensive list of books for further study.

Coming up with a list of introductory books will be hard.  It won’t be like religion, with The Bible or Quran, where one book will do, science will take many.  And where do we start?  At the beginning with The Big Bang and cosmology, the science of the very big?  But to understand cosmology requires understanding particle physics, which is the study of the very small.  Science really doesn’t make sense without understanding evolution.  It really helps to grasp how unintelligent design, in a random chaotic system, can produce order even when the second law of thermodynamics exists.  Entropy is such a backasswards slippery concept to mentally wrestle.

Developing the Scientific Canon will be hard.  Obviously our school systems are failing at the job, even when they have a captured audience and powerful textbooks.  Can anyone list twelve books that will give the average person a basic grasp of science?  Even with a longer list, like Harold Bloom’s Western Canon list, how well verse in science can a reader become without knowing mathematics?  Is a scientific understanding beyond most people?

Here are some books I’ve been very impressed with, but I can’t claim are the best volumes for the introductory list.

A-Short-History-Of-Nearly-Everything

the-canon

the-elegant-universe

ontheoriginofspecies

DawkinsGreatestShowCover

guns-germs-and-steel

first-three-minutes

A Universe from Nothing

brief-history

the-edge-of-physics

the-information

the-selfish-gene

social-conquest-of-the-earth

in-pursuit-of-the-unknown-17-equations-that-changed-the-world

wonderful-life

beginning-of-infinity

your-inner-fish

surely-you-must-be-joking

JWH – 2/15/13

Identifying the Greatest Books of All Time

Books, whether novels or nonfiction, are inherently subjective in their appeal, so is it even possible to claim to know the greatest books ever written?  I don’t think any one person can objectively claim any list of books are the best ever written.  However, I think it is possible, by using statistics, and the wisdom of crowds, to identify the books that have had the greatest impact on the most people.

marilyn-reads-joyce

There is a long tradition for critics and scholars to list books they proclaim are great.  This is subjective no matter how well educated the selectors are in literature.  Now, if we take a hundred literary authorities and ask them to list their top 100 books of all time, put those books into a database and then create a list that shows which books were on the most lists, I think we can consider this more objective.  But even still, there is no Platonic ideal form of a great book that exists in reality.  How great is War and Peace if you can’t stand to read it?

That doesn’t stop people like me, life long bookworms addicted to books, to always search for our next fix, hoping for the most intense literary high yet.

Aggregating best of book lists is different from fan polls, although if we poll enough readers, standout titles will emerge.  Critics and scholars have read widely and studied literature, so their opinions count for more, but their opinions aren’t perfect.  Scholars know the older books better, whereas fans know the newer books.

Back in the 1980s I created a meta-list of science fiction books for a fanzine called Lan’s Lantern.  It was simple, I used eight best of lists, to produce a final list that contained books that had been on at least three of the eight lists.  I called the list The Classics of Science Fiction.  In the 1990s I updated the system with more lists, and put it online.  In the early 2000s I got some outside help and expanded the citation lists to 28 best of lists and set the cutoff to seven lists.  You can see the ranked results here.  The top three books had been on 25 of the 28 lists.  I thought that represented a kind of validity.

Ever since then I’ve wanted to build a database for all books, not just science fiction.  Several years back I got a domain name and hosting service and set up the beginnings of such a system, but the database got hacked and I gave up.  Recently I discovered that Shane Sherman has developed a database system at The Greatest Books of All Time that is similar to my dream book site.  He covers fiction and nonfiction and works with 43 best of lists.  However, Shane uses a different method for creating his final rankings by selective weighing of lists.  Yet another approach to identifying the great books.

Shane’s site is quite wonderful.  It’s simple and elegant.  Create an account or sign in with Twitter, and then start scanning the lists.  You can check the books you’ve read and the ones you want to read and the site will remember.  If you’re a book lover, you’ll enjoy going through the various lists, both the 43 best of lists and Shane’s two generated lists:  Fiction and Nonfiction.  I love best of lists.  I collect books recommending the best books of all time.  Over the years I’ve been teaching myself about the history of books.  When I make new friends I love talking to them about their favorite books.  I find the fame of books fascinating.

Best of book lists can be created from fan polls, critic lists, scholars lists, awards lists, library lists, and other criteria, such as whether a novel has been made into a movie, or was an all time best seller.  Popularity is important, but it’s not the only factor.  Critics and scholars are far more knowledgeable about the history of books than normal fans, but if the fan polls are large enough, they can be effective.  Various book awards, Pulitzer, Booker, Newberry, etc., have their own systems for selecting books, that try to go beyond the subjective, but the award judges have limitations too.  No one person can know about even a tiny fraction of published books.

If one list can’t be perfect, what about aggregating many?  Combining lists can generate interesting results.  For example, I’ll use four lists.

Shane Sherman’s top dozen books are:

  1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  2. Ulysses by James Joyce
  3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  6. 1984 by George Orwell
  7. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  10. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  11. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  12. Middlemarch by George Eliot

If you look at the 43 lists at Shane’s site you will be hard press to find another one that has the same top 12 novels.  One that does come close is The Novel 100: A Ranking of Greatest Novels of All Time by David Burt.  From what I can tell, Burt doesn’t use a system but just claims to be an expert.  His top 12 are:

  1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  3. Ulysses by James Joyce
  4. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  6. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  8. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  9. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
  10. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
  11. Emma by Jane Austen
  12. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The overlap suggests that Burt is a very savvy literary scholar because he comes very close to the results generated by Shane’s system.

J. Peder Zane found another way to use the wisdom of crowds by asking 125 writers to submit their favorite 10 books and then built a database to see which books were recommended the most.   The list was called The Top Ten.  Using a point system, these 12 books came in at the top:

  1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  7. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  8. The Stories of Anton Chekhov
  9. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  10. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  11. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  12. Ulysses by James Joyce

As you can see, many of the same titles are showing up over and over again.  Ulysses, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time and Madame Bovary were on all three of these lists.

Now compare this to a large fan poll.  The BBC got over 750,000 readers to vote on their favorites, these were their top 12:

  1. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
  2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  3. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
  4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
  6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  7. Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
  8. 1984 by George Orwell
  9. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
  10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  11. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  12. Wuthering Heights by Emile Bronte

The British are partial to British authors, with only two Americans making it to the top dozen, and no non-English writers in this portion of the list.  War and Peace did make it to the #20 spot, and Ulysses came in at #78.  Many of the others titles from the other three list did show up within the BBC Big Read top 100, so even average bookworms can love stogy literary classics, just not as much as fun books like Harry Potter.

If we could get one million bookworms from all over the world, what would that list look like?  What if there was a web site that allowed every bookworm in the world to submit their top ten favorite books, what might the overlap list look like?  If a hundred million Chinese readers participated, what Chinese books would we see?  It’s interesting that in the first three lists above, created by English speakers that so many non-English books made the list, but the western world does dominate.

The Top 100 Works in World Literature attempts to correct the western centric view.  You’ll have to visit the site to see the list, because it’s alphabetical, so there’s no top 12 to show and compare.  However, many of the books from the top three list above are on this top 100 list too.

There are a good many best books lists out there.  Shane has gathered 43.  I wonder what using 100, or 500 such lists would show?  If we could survey all the schools, colleges and universities around the world for what books are taught each year, what would that list look like?  What if we could see the long term sales figures for books, to see which books sell the most year after year?  And what books have inspired the most movies, plays and television productions?  Which books have been written about the most?  Which books have been quoted the most?

If somehow we could put all this information in one giant database, and develop a point system that weighs their different values, I think we’d come up with a very valid list of top books.  Of course, such a list would then cause a recursive effect.  If all readers felt certain books were not to be missed, wouldn’t that further reinforce their success?  Isn’t such an effect already happening with English majors?

If a novel came out in 2013 that was more powerful than anything written by Tolstoy or Joyce, how long would it take to be recognized by this statistical system?  Meta list statistical systems favors older books with momentum.  Only well trained scholars and critics could spot a new contender quickly.

Other Aggregate Lists

Fan Polls

Scholar/Critic/Editor/Reviewer Lists

JWH – 2/12/13