Most Common Books and Authors

First off, I want to apologize to Myza, Amy, and Michelle, as this data doesn't include your lists. I typed in all the lists that were available by the time I went to bed last night and sent the data over to my husband, who has a lot more computer skills than me, and he created these reports. He was already mostly done before I found the three new lists this morning and I didn't have the heart to hand him another 300 entries. I'm very sorry, and if I figure out a way to add these and other incoming lists to my data in the future, I will update this list. The good news is that with 20 lists, this probably provides a fairly accurate cross-section, so I doubt the data will change tremendously until we have a lot more lists.

We sorted the list two ways - first, by most common title, second, by most common author. I'll give you guys the title list first:

1. Eliot, George - Middlemarch - 12 people are reading this
2. Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace - 10
3. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - Love in the Time of Cholera - 9
4. Martel, Yann - Life of Pi - 8
5. Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary - 8
6. Morrison, Tony - Beloved - 8
7. Wharton, Edith - Age of Innocence - 7
8. Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness - 7
9. Adams, Richard - Watership Down - 7
10. Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Game - 7
11. Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar - 7
12. Walker, Alice - The Color Purple - 7
13. Diaz, Junot - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - 7
14. Dickens, Charles - Bleak House - 7
15. Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield - 7
16. Forster, E.M. - A Room with a View - 7
17. Kidd, Sue Monk - The Secret Life of Bees - 7
18. Rand, Ayn - Atlas Shrugged - 7
19. Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited - 7

I let 7 be my cutoff as after that there are like 40 titles that 6 people have in common...

Here is the list sorted by most common author. It's longer, because we have more authors in common than titles. I cut this one off at 8 instances so that it wouldn't get too out of hand. I'm sorting them by unique instances (number of blog members to have this author on their list) rather than by the number of times the author shows up on the master list, though I included that information for fun anyway. :)

1. Dickens, Charles - 24 instances - 15 unique instances
2. Austen, Jane - 30 - 14
3. Dostoevsky, Fyodor - 13 - 13
4. Hemingway, Ernest - 19 - 13
5. Atwood, Margaret - 14 - 12
6. Eliot, George - 17 - 12
7. Faulkner, William - 19 - 11
8. Fitzgerald, F. Scott - 13 - 11
9. Forster, E.M. - 15 - 11
10. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - 16 - 11
11. Steinbeck, John - 20 - 11
12. Tolstoy, Leo - 17 - 11
13. Woolf, Virginia - 13 - 11
14. Flaubert, Gustav - 10 - 10
15. Hardy, Thomas - 12 - 10
16. Morrison, Tony - 13 - 10
17. Nabokov, Vladimir - 13 - 10
18. Rand, Ayn - 11 - 10
19. Wharton, Edith - 12 - 10
20. Conrad, Joseph - 9 - 9
21. Joyce, James - 12 - 9
22. Allende, Isabel - 12 - 8
23. Bronte, Charlotte - 10 - 8
24. Cather, Willa - 9 - 8
25. Chabon, Michael - 15 - 8
26. Eugenides, Jeffrey - 8 - 8
27. Ishiguro, Kazuo - 8 - 8
28. Kafka, Franz - 9 - 8
29. Kidd, Sue Monk - 10 - 8
30. Lawrence, D.H. - 12 - 8
31. Martel, Yann - 8 - 8
32. Maugham, William Somerset - 8 - 8
33. Murakami, Haruki - 8 - 8
34. Orwell, George - 10 - 8
35. Roth, Philip - 14 - 8
36. Vonnegut, Kurt - 8 - 8
37. Waugh, Evelyn - 10 - 8
38. Wilde, Oscar - 11 - 8

Emily, let me know if you want me to change/add/subtract anything on here. And like I said before, if I figure out a way to incorporate all the incoming lists, I will update this at that point.