Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Stats Update!

Statistics Update for the "Second 1000" Books

These statistics are for the second 1000 unique books in our list of books (for all lists entered by the end of April. I will be getting to lists entered after April after I clean up the initial entries...)

These 1000 books start with the letter "L" and go partially through books beginning with "The" in the title. In fact, the last book in this list (number 1000), begins, "The End..." (Appropriate, eh?)

These 1000 books contain about 900 duplicate reads, so our original list of 5300 has been winnowed down to about 3500 unique reads. This number will collapse further when I get to the third 1000...(The "third 1000" list is currently at 1534 entries. It would not surprise me to see the list be de-duped down to less than 1000 entries.)

Some books were entered with the beginning "The" in the title, some were not. I've combined them as I've come across them, but I'm certain I've missed a few. When I'm able to combine all the lists and sort by author, the numbers will collapse even more.

In this middle section of the list, the book with the highest number of projected reads is Middlemarch by George Elliot (20).

Second place (tied at 17 requests) are Lolita by Nabakov and Northanger Abbey by Austen.

Rebecca, by De Maurier, is in third place with 16.

These numbers may change slightly as the other lists make it to my tallies.

Other books with high read requests include: Life of Pi, Martel - 15, Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez - 15, and Moby Dick, Melville. Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut; The Bell Jar, Plath; and, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky, all have 13 read requests.

There are 779 unique reads on this "Second 1000" list.

The authors with the most requested books on the list are:

Sue Grafton and Alexander McCall Smith with 8 each. (Both are Mystery/Detective Authors)

Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare both have 7 books on the list.

Jane Austen "only" has 6 (but has 7 if you include her co-authored book with Seth Grahame-Smith, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies...)

Mark Twain - 6

Toni Morrison, Jodi Picoult, Terry Pratchet, John Updike - 5

Margaret Atwood has 4 books on the list, as does A. S. Byatt, George Eliot, Neil Gaiman, Jenna Black, Steven King and Cormac McCarthy.

These numbers will climb higher when I combine all the lists.

Those readers with the most unique reads on their lists include:

Jason - 31
Iasa & Kristina - 34
Andromeda - 44

These numbers will go down as some of the "TBD" books are chosen and (will probably) duplicate some books already on the list.

As for paired reads...

Kelly and Moonrat have added 4 more to their list. Other players with uniquely-paired reads include:

Amanda/Amanda Snow - 2
Biblio Brat/Michelle - 3M - 2
Crystal/Merry M - 2
Goedi/Purple Clover - 2
Jason/Lisa - 2
Merry M/Shelley - 2

In this section of the list, we've actually got a trio with two uniquely-paired reads:
Briony/Kelly/Moonrat - 2

Contact me via email if you'd like to know what your uniquely-paired books are so you can hook up. I'll try to get these items posted to the Web ASAP so you can review yourselves...but it's still going to take a few weeks.

Thanks!

4 comments:

Amanda said...

I'm not sure I understand the pairing statistics. I went and looked at Amanda Snow's list, because I was sure we had more than 2 books in common, and I believe we have 5 of the same books listed. ? How do you calculate unique pairs? Am I misunderstanding?

Kelly A. Harmon said...

Hi Amanda

You probably *do* have more pairs than I listed in this stats update. I've only included here the "middle third" of 1000 books (The list is so large, I've broken it down so that I can give timely updates...).

Also: what I'm listing as unique pairs are the books which ONLY you and Amanda Snow have on your lists...you probably share more than two books, but some other folks may have those books on their lists as well.

So...in this list of books, there are two books which ONLY you and Amanda Snow (and no one else) have on your lists to read.

Does that help? Maybe it's a crazy stat...

Amanda said...

Ah, that makes much more sense now. I was wondering why the highest number was 4. I thought people shared much more in common than that. :)

Linda said...

What can I say? You are amazing... Thanks for the interesting numbers! Peace, Linda