Which of this year’s books will be remembered in 50 or 100 years’ time? I won’t be around to keep count, but it’s a question that we can ask of the books of 50 and 100 years ago. So, I have crunched the numbers for the books of 1923 and 1973, as tracked by ownership on LibraryThing and the number of people who have rated them on Goodreads. Obviously there’s an English-language bias there, but I’m pleasantly surprised that a number of translated novels make both lists.
For 1923, The Prophet by Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran is way out in front. I’ve read it and the next two on the list and will report back on them in the next couple of days. I am familiar at least with most of the others, and have read another four or five, but they all look interesting. There are works of poetry and a play here; neither genre appears on the 1973 list. None of these appears in the Publisher’s Weekly lists of best-selling books in the USA for any year in the 1920s.
| Title | Author | GR ratings | LT readers | Genre | Language |
| The Prophet | Kahlil Gibran | 285,637 | 13,524 | poetry / philosophy | English |
| The Murder on the Links | Agatha Christie | 84,057 | 4,181 | fiction (detective) | English |
| Whose Body? | Dorothy L. Sayers | 53,897 | 4,732 | fiction (detective) | English |
| Emily of New Moon | L.M. Montgomery | 48,741 | 3,888 | fiction (children) | English |
| Zeno’s Conscience / La coscienza di Zeno | Italo Svevo | 24,462 | 3,425 | fiction | Italian |
| The Inimitable Jeeves | P.G. Wodehouse | 25,937 | 3,221 | fiction (humour) | English |
| Bambi | Felix Salten | 35,470 | 2,348 | fiction (children) | German |
| Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening | Robert Frost | 10,446 | 2,334 | poetry | English |
| Leave It to Psmith | P.G. Wodehouse | 10,835 | 2,118 | fiction (humour) | English |
| Saint Joan | George Bernard Shaw | 8,999 | 2,208 | stage | English |
| Cane | Jean Toomer | 10,201 | 1,806 | fiction (African American) | English |
| A Lost Lady | Willa Cather | 6,622 | 1,537 | fiction | English |
| The Fatal Eggs / Роковые яйца | Mikhail Bulgakov | 10,010 | 723 | fiction (science fiction / satire) | Russian |
| St Francis of Assisi | G.K. Chesterton | 4,284 | 1,583 | biography | English |
| The Devil in the Flesh / Le Diable au corps | Raymond Radiguet | 5,963 | 1,052 | fiction | French |
| Sonnets to Orpheus / Die Sonette an Orpheus | Rainer Maria Rilke | 3,409 | 1,021 | poetry | German |
| Antic Hay | Aldous Huxley | 2,213 | 1,266 | fiction (humour) | English |
| The Lurking Fear | H.P. Lovecraft | 2,201 | 972 | fiction (horror) | English |
| The Dark Frigate | Charles Boardman Hawes | 2,364 | 702 | fiction (children) | English |
| My Universities / Мои университеты | Maxim Gorky | 2,455 | 298 | autobiography | Russian |
I have read more than half of the 1973 list, and reread the second and third after crunching these numbers (reviews to come). There’s a distinct shift towards more popular literature, with more than a third of the list being fantasy or sf including The Princess Bride, top book by a long way, possibly due to having been later made into a hit fantasy film. Breakfast of Champions and The Hollow Hills both feature in the Publisher’s Weekly list for 1973, and both topped the New York Times Best Sellers list at different points that year.
| Title | Author | GR ratings | LT readers | Genre | Language |
| The Princess Bride | William Goldman | 876,632 | 24,080 | fiction (fantasy) | English |
| Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | 252,249 | 15,739 | fiction (satire, possibly sf/fantasy) | English |
| A Wind in the Door | Madeleine L’Engle | 125,473 | 12,097 | fiction (children, sf) | English |
| Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | 42,455 | 10,403 | fiction | English |
| Rendezvous with Rama | Arthur C. Clarke | 158,937 | 9,660 | fiction (sf) | English |
| The Dark Is Rising | Susan Cooper | 54,681 | 8,088 | fiction (children, fantasy) | English |
| Knowing God | J.I. Packer | 55,725 | 8,069 | religion | English |
| Sula | Toni Morrison | 88,287 | 7,260 | fiction (African American) | English |
| Time Enough for Love | Robert A. Heinlein | 34,891 | 5,403 | fiction (sf) | English |
| The Gulag Archipelago / Архипелаг ГУЛАГ | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 28,572 | 4,918 | history / reportage | Russian |
| How to Eat Fried Worms | Thomas Rockwell | 47,178 | 4,516 | fiction (children) | English |
| The Hollow Hills | Mary Stewart | 21,829 | 4,025 | fiction (fantasy) | English |
| Momo | Michael Ende | 74,409 | 3,789 | fiction (children, fantasy) | German |
| Crash | J.G. Ballard | 24,530 | 3,387 | fiction | English |
| Fear of Flying | Erica Jong | 21,026 | 3,364 | fiction | English |
| Rubyfruit Jungle | Rita Mae Brown | 40,058 | 3,111 | fiction | English |
| Summer of My German Soldier | Bette Greene | 16,884 | 2,893 | fiction (children) | English |
| Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 | Hunter S. Thompson | 22,055 | 2,858 | reportage | English |
| Child of God | Cormac McCarthy | 41,844 | 2,852 | fiction | English |
| Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities | Flora Rheta Schreiber | 88,919 | 2,799 | psychology | English |
So, a bit of compare and contrast:
- 70% of the 1923 books are in English, compared to 90% in 1973.
- 70% of the 1923 books are prose fiction, compared to 80% in 1973.
- 25% of the 1923 books are for younger readers, compared to 15% in 1973.
- 10% of the 1923 books are sf / fantasy / horror, compared to 35% in 1973.
- At least 15% of the 1923 books are intentionally funny. I think only one of the 1973 books is meant to be humorous. (One could make a case for a few others.)
I might keep up this analysis for the next few years, and see what titles it throws up.