Am within shouting distance of being one of the top 25 users. But I am not going to strive hard over the rest of the weekend to make sure I pass the mark, since I’m pretty confident I will do so eventually. I reckon I’m around half way through, so my total book tally is around 2000 or maybe a little short of that.
Odd things: Sometimes quite difficult to persuade it to find books on, for instance, the Amazon.co.uk catalogue, even when you can find said books yourself on said catalogue (most recent such example: my 1954 Regent Classics edition of Moby-Dick). For some of my other books it’s understandable that the search robots couldn’t locate them, either on grounds of geographical origin or age.
I’m interested that apart from genre literature the next most popular categopry appears to be theology, with top non-fiction author being John Piper. The only other author of the current top 25 who I simply haven’t heard of is Tamora Pierce. I have at least read all the others apart from Mercedes Lackey. Of the top 25 books I’ve read everything except The Catcher in the Rye, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Life of Pi. But my list of unread books that I already own is quite long enough.
FWIW, Sowerby was the constuency most of the area I now live in outside of Halifax was called up until 1983, when it was replaced by Calder Valley–which as far as I can tell is the old Sowerby seat minus Sowerby Bridge (but including Sowerby village) but with Brighouse district added. It’s a godawful constituency now, with borders that make little sense, and it’s impossible to sensibly travel by any means at all from one end (Brighouse, where I live) to the other (Todmorden, where our candidate lived) without leaving the seat.
I believe it was always a bellweather marginal, in the same way that Brighouse and Spen was.
Why it’s a name mostly confined to people that’ve left the area I’m not really sure, but there’re alsoa lot of Marsdens living in That London ( being the best known). I suspect migrant workers would take the name of where they were from, but that’s just guesswork.