Ten Great Books

[Kumquatqueen]

It's unlikely that anybody who isn't American is going to care much about a book about the American Civil War. We're obsessed with the time period, for a variety of reasons, but it doesn't have the pull for those outside our experience. I love that book, read it to my kid when he was younger.

Drama and fancy dresses, what's not to like? Gone with the Wind was a success worldwide, more recently series like North and South, Cold Mountain, many more. Loads of war stories are interesting no matter whether you care about the particular war or not - War and Peace, Les Mis...

You could say that all wars are the same for literature purposes - there's the military doing their stuff, the civilians getting fucked over, soldiers leaving loved ones behind; the exact war makes little difference beyond the clothing.

 

[yowser]

I learned a lot from this exercise (multiple levels) and appreciate the input from the crew.

In the off chance that a couple of you may be interested in further consideration, I've done a couple things.

I've put the list in Librarything, one of those lovely internet artifacts that show up so nicely and so often. Doing this allows you to look at the list in a variety of ways, sort and view analytics, etc.

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/Litbooks

There are a few different ways to visually see how the list displays, here is a link with some different data for you. (Poking around LT you can do things like an author cloud, etc.)

https://www.librarything.com/stats/Litbooks/genre

Those of you bookish types who like to have a place for your reading lists (and Northern hemi-dwellers have summer beach-read lists to consider) might want to explore an LT account - free, minimal info needed (email address is the furthest it gets.)

I thought I would post the spreadsheet, but the site doesn't allow that kind of file to be linked, so I will do a table post arranged by LC classification next (2 parts.) (It is possible to download the data from LT, but if anyone wants an easier hand-off, DM me with your email and I can send you the native spreadsheet.)

New folks, or those who didn't contribute their top-ten list earlier, you can post here and depending on my time/effort/interest continuum, I'll make the LT list dynamic, and add to it. Thanks everyone.

Edit- it'll take me some time to format the next post - check in shortly...

 

[yowser]

Alright, I give up. Cannot seem to load the list here (as table or otherwise, too many extra characters added.) Go take a look at:
https://www.librarything.com/catalog/Litbooks or DM me with your email if you want the spreadsheet.