by Ben Blatt
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
Let’s Get Invisible
Night of the Living Dummy
The Girl Who Cried Monster
Welcome to Camp Nightmare
The Ghost Next Door
The Haunted Mask
Be Careful What You Wish For . . .
Piano Lessons Can Be Murder
The Werewolf of Fever Swamp
You Can’t Scare Me!
One Day at Horrorland
Why I’m Afraid of Bees
Monster Blood II
Deep Trouble
The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight
Go Eat Worms!
Ghost Beach
Return of the Mummy
Phantom of the Auditorium
Attack of the Mutant
My Hairiest Adventure
A Night in Terror Tower
The Cuckoo Clock of Doom
Monster Blood III
It Came from Beneath the Sink!
Night of the Living Dummy II
The Barking Ghost
The Horror at Camp Jellyjam
Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes
A Shocker on Shock Street
The Haunted Mask II
The Headless Ghost
The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena
How I Got My Shrunken Head
Night of the Living Dummy III
Bad Hare Day
Egg Monsters from Mars
The Beast from the East
Say Cheese and Die—Again!
Ghost Camp
How to Kill a Monster
Legend of the Lost Legend
Attack of the Jack-O’-Lanterns
Vampire Breath
Calling All Creeps!
Beware, the Snowman
How I Learned to Fly
Chicken, Chicken
Don’t Go to Sleep!
The Blob That Ate Everyone
The Curse of Camp Cold Lake
My Best Friend Is Invisible
Deep Trouble II
The Haunted School
Werewolf Skin
I Live in Your Basement
Monster Blood IV
Amy Tan—6 Novels
The Joy Luck Club
The Kitchen God’s Wife
The Hundred Secret Senses
The Bonesetter’s Daughter
Saving Fish from Drowning
The Valley of Amazement
Donna Tartt—3 Novels
The Secret History
The Little Friend
The Goldfinch
J. R. R. Tolkien—4 Novels
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King
The Hobbit
Mark Twain—13 Books
The Gilded Age
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Prince and the Pauper
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
The American Claimant
Tom Sawyer Abroad
Pudd’nhead Wilson
Tom Sawyer, Detective
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
A Double Barrelled Detective Story (novella)
A Horse’s Tale (novella)
The Mysterious Stranger
John Updike—26 Novels
Rabbit, Run
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit at Rest
Bech: A Book
Bech Is Back
Bech at Bay
Memories of the Ford Administration
The Witches of Eastwick
The Widows of Eastwick
A Month of Sundays
Roger’s Version
S
The Poorhouse Fair
The Centaur
Of the Farm
Couples
Marry Me
The Coup
Brazil
In the Beauty of the Lilies
Toward the End of Time
Gertrude and Claudius
Seek My Face
Village
Terrorist
Kurt Vonnegut—14 Novels
Timequake
Slaughterhouse-Five
Slapstick
The Sirens of Titan
Player Piano
Mother Night
Jailbird
Hocus Pocus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Galápagos
Deadeye Dick
Cat’s Cradle
Breakfast of Champions
Bluebeard
Alice Walker—8 Novels
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
Meridian
The Color Purple
The Temple of My Familiar
Possessing the Secret of Joy
By the Light of My Father’s Smile
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
Edith Wharton—22 Novels
Ethan Frome
The Valley of Decision
Bunner Sisters
Summer
Sanctuary
The Gods Arrive
The Touchstone
Hudson River Bracketed
The Custom of the Country
The Marne: A Tale of War
A Son at the Front
The Reef
The Fruit of the Tree
The Age of Innocence
The Buccaneers
The Glimpses of the Moon
Twilight Sleep
The Mother’s Recompense
The Children
Fast and Loose
Madame de Treymes
The House of Mirth
E. B. White—3 Novels
Charlotte’s Web
Stuart Little
The Trumpet of the Swan
Tom Wolfe—4 Novels
A Man in Full
Back to Blood
I Am Charlotte Simmons
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Virginia Woolf—9 Novels
The Voyage Out
Night and Day
Jacob’s Room
Mrs. Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
Orlando
The Waves
The Years
Between the Acts
Markus Zusak—5 Novels
The Underdog
Fighting Ruben Wolfe
Getting the Girl
The Messenger
The Book Thief
Additional Bibliography Lists Used (in order of appearance)
Adverb Chart for 15 Authors—Introduced Chapter 1
The authors chosen for this early graph were picked to represent a variety of time periods and genres before moving on to the “Great Books” list that dominates the rest of the chapter. I wanted to start with a smaller sample before moving to the full fifty-author list. All other lists in the chapter, including the “Great Books by Great Authors” list, are delineated within the text.
Goodreads Data: Average Rating vs. Number of Ratings—Introduced Chapter 1
The huge sample size afforded by Goodreads helps overcome the idiosyncrasies of any particular book critic, who might like one book over another for personal or peculiar reasons. But using the numerical rating itself (e.g., 3.5 stars out of 5.0) is still imperfect; and instead the number of ratings a book has been given ends up being a better approximation of the book’s quality. The reason that the average rating falters as a metric is that the sample size can differ drastically from book to book, and this ends up skewing the rating in surprising ways.
To see the sampling issues that arise in a rating system, consider the numerical ratings for the Twilight series. The first book in the tetralogy has over 2.3 million ratings and averages a 3.56 out of 5. The fourth book has far fewer ratings (over 850,000), but averages a 3.72. The first book had 23 % of readers give it just one or two stars. One could presume that the peopl
e who did not like the first book would not keep reading the series at the same rate as those who loved it. As a result, those who already liked the series kept reading and the average satisfaction derived from the books rose from their continual high ratings.
This selection bias is even more obvious when looking at the ratings for Midnight Sun. In 2008, an unfinished version of what was supposed to be a retelling of the first book in Meyer’s series (but from the perspective of vampire Edward Cullen) was leaked online. This book was never finished, edited, or promoted, but on Goodreads.com it has a higher rating, 4.06, than any of the Twilight books. It does, however, have fewer ratings, around 125,000. These 125,000 are people who went far out of their way to read the text, meaning the large majority of them could be considered superfans. These are readers who already loved Stephenie Meyer, and already loved Edward Cullen, which helps explain why an unreleased book has such a high rating.
Many other series follow this same pattern. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series, has half the ratings of the first Harry Potter book, but is rated the highest in the series while the first book has the second-lowest rating. Each of the three books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy increases in rating while the number of ratings they receive goes down. The three books in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy follow this exact same pattern.
So what does any of this have to do with adverbs? It’s an illustration that finding an objective measure of a book is not a straightforward task. The Pearl has more than 97,000 ratings on Goodreads.com with a rating of 3.33. Meanwhile, Steinbeck’s novel To a God Unknown has a rating of 3.90 with just 4,200 ratings. Many more people have been in an English class where they had to read The Pearl whether they wanted to or not, while select fans waded through several other Steinbeck books first to get to the latter. To a God Unknown even has a higher rating than The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, even though these books have hundreds of thousands more reviews and are widely considered Steinbeck’s greatest works. The same pattern can be seen on Amazon as well. Much like a sequel whittling down to an author’s true fan base, the smaller sample size skews the rating when we compare an author’s more obscure books to their classics. And for this reason, the total number of ratings received by a book becomes a better approximation of its quality and status.
Classic Literature—Introduced Chapter 2
This list consists of the top fifty books written by men and the top fifty books written by women on the composite list “The Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century” assembled by Brian Kunde.
A Thousand Acres—Jane Smiley
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—Betty Smith
The Age of Innocence—Edith Wharton
Bastard Out of Carolina—Dorothy Allison
Beloved—Toni Morrison
Burger’s Daughter—Nadine Gordimer
Cold Sassy Tree—Olive Ann Burns
Death Comes for the Archbishop—Willa Cather
Ellen Foster—Kaye Gibbons
Ethan Frome—Edith Wharton
Gone with the Wind—Margaret Mitchell
A Good Man Is Hard to Find—Flannery O’Connor
Jazz—Toni Morrison
Little House in the Big Woods—Laura Ingalls Wilder
Rebecca—Daphne du Maurier
Mrs. Dalloway—Virginia Woolf
My Ántonia—Willa Cather
O Pioneers!—Willa Cather
Ordinary People— Judith Guest
Orlando—Virginia Woolf
Pale Horse, Pale Rider—Katherine Anne Porter
Possession—A. S. Byatt
Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand
Rubyfruit Jungle—Rita Mae Brown
Song of Solomon—Toni Morrison
Sula—Toni Morrison
Talk Before Sleep— Elizabeth Berg
The Bean Trees—Barbara Kingsolver
The Bell Jar—Sylvia Plath
The Bluest Eye—Toni Morrison
The Color Purple—Alice Walker
The Death of the Heart—Elizabeth Bowen
The Fountainhead—Ayn Rand
The Golden Notebook—Doris Lessing
The Good Earth—Pearl Buck
The Handmaid’s Tale—Margaret Atwood
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—Carson McCullers
The House of Mirth—Edith Wharton
The Joy Luck Club—Amy Tan
The Mists of Avalon—Marion Bradley
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—Muriel Spark
The Shell Seekers—Rosamunde Pilcher
The Shipping News—Annie Proulx
The Stone Diaries—Carol Shields
The Thorn Birds—Colleen McCullough
Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird—Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf
Under the Net—Iris Murdoch
Wide Sargasso Sea—Jean Rhys
A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess
A Farewell to Arms—Ernest Hemingway
A Passage to India—E. M. Forster
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—James Joyce
A Room with a View—E. M. Forster
All the King’s Men—Robert Penn Warren
An American Tragedy—Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm—George Orwell
As I Lay Dying—William Faulkner
Brave New World—Aldous Huxley
Catch-22—Joseph Heller
Charlotte’s Web—E. B. White
Fahrenheit 451—Ray Bradbury
For Whom the Bell Tolls—Ernest Hemingway
Go Tell It on the Mountain—James Baldwin
Heart of Darkness—Joseph Conrad
Howards End—E. M. Forster
I, Claudius—Robert Graves
Invisible Man—Ralph Ellison
Lady Chatterley’s Lover—D. H. Lawrence
Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies—William Golding
Lord of the Rings (all)—J. R. R. Tolkien
Native Son—Richard Wright
1984—George Orwell
Of Mice and Men—John Steinbeck
On the Road—Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five—Kurt Vonnegut
Sons and Lovers—D. H. Lawrence
Sophie’s Choice—William Styron
Stranger in a Strange Land—Robert A. Heinlein
Tender Is the Night—F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Call of the Wild—Jack London
The Catcher in the Rye—J. D. Salinger
The Good Soldier—Ford Madox Ford
The Grapes of Wrath—John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby—F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Hobbit—J. R. R. Tolkien
The Jungle—Upton Sinclair
The Old Man and the Sea—Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury—William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises—Ernest Hemingway
The Way of All Flesh—Samuel Butler
The Wings of the Dove—Henry James
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—L. Frank Baum
The World According to Garp—John Irving
Ulysses—James Joyce
Winesburg, Ohio—Sherwood Anderson
Winnie the Pooh—A. A. Milne
Modern Popular Fiction—Introduced Chapter 2
Starting with the end of 2014 and going backward, this list consists of the last fifty number one New York Times fiction bestsellers written by women and the last fifty by men. No books with co-authors were included.
A Week in Winter—Maeve Binchy
Believing the Lie—Elizabeth George
Big Little Lies—Liane Moriarty
Calculated in Death—J. D. Robb
Celebrity in Death—J. D. Robb
Chasing Fire—Nora Roberts
Daddy’s Gone a Hunting—Mary Higgins Clark
> Dead Ever After—Charlaine Harris
Dead Reckoning—Charlaine Harris
Deadlocked—Charlaine Harris
Dreams of Joy—Lisa See
Concealed in Death—J. D. Robb
Explosive Eighteen—Janet Evanovich
Flash and Bones—Kathy Reichs
Frost Burned—Patricia Briggs
Gone Girl—Gillian Flynn
Hit List—Laurell K. Hamilton
Home Front—Kristin Hannah
How the Light Gets In—Louise Penny
I’ve Got You Under My Skin—Mary Higgins Clark
Kiss the Dead—Laurell K. Hamilton
Leaving Time—Jodi Picoult
Lone Wolf—Jodi Picoult
Lover at Last—J. R. Ward
Lover Reborn—J. R. Ward
New York to Dallas—J. D. Robb
Notorious Nineteen—Janet Evanovich
Power Play—Danielle Steel
Shadow of Night—Deborah Harkness
Smokin’ Seventeen—Janet Evanovich
Starting Now—Debbie Macomber
Takedown Twenty—Janet Evanovich
The Book of Life—Deborah Harkness
The Casual Vacancy—J. K. Rowling
The Collector—Nora Roberts
The Cuckoo’s Calling—Robert Galbraith
The Goldfinch—Donna Tartt
The Invention of Wings—Sue Monk Kidd
The King—J. R. Ward
The Long Way Home—Louise Penny
The Lost Years—Mary Higgins Clark
The One & Only—Emily Giffin
The Storyteller—Jodi Picoult
The Undead Pool—Kim Harrison
Top Secret Twenty-One—Janet Evanovich
Until the End of Time—Danielle Steel
W Is for Wasted—Sue Grafton
Whiskey Beach—Nora Roberts
Wicked Business—Janet Evanovich
Written in My Own Heart’s Blood—Diana Gabaldon
11-22-63—Stephen King
77 Shadow Street—Dean Koontz
A Wanted Man—Lee Child
Act of War—Brad Thor
Alex Cross, Run—James Patterson
Calico Joe—John Grisham
Cold Days—Jim Butcher
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage—Haruki Murakami
Cross My Heart—James Patterson
Deadline—John Sandford
Doctor Sleep—Stephen King
Edge of Eternity—Ken Follett
Gray Mountain—John Grisham
Hope to Die—James Patterson
Inferno—Dan Brown
Kill Alex Cross—James Patterson
Kill Shot—Vince Flynn
Missing You—Harlan Coben
Mr. Mercedes—Stephen King
Never Go Back—Lee Child
Personal—Lee Child
Revival—Stephen King
Six Years—Harlan Coben
Skin Game—Jim Butcher
Stay Close—Harlan Coben
Stolen Prey—John Sandford