This meme made the rounds in 2014:
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.
Facebook’s Data Science team subsequently analyzed 130,000 status updates that were specifically responsive to this meme. Here were the top ten choices:
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (21.08%)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (14.48%)
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (13.86%)
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (7.48%)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (7.28%)
The Holy Bible (7.21%)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (5.97%)
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (5.82%)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (5.70%)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (5.61%)
To see the top one hundred choices, go here.
To see my own choices as of 2014, go here.