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Facebook's 'books that stayed with you' meme: Here are the top picks

Facebook recently revealed some of the books that users picked most often when participating in a meme about what books 'stayed with you.' 

The 'Harry Potter' books are by J.K. Rowling.
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

If you’ve been on Facebook recently, chances are one or more of your friends has completed the “10 books that have stayed with you” meme (there’s also a movie version).

Lada Adamic, who is a computational social scientist at Facebook, and Pinkesh Patel of Facebook recently released some numbers on the site as to what books are topping users’ lists. The top result, based on more than 130,000 status updates from the last two weeks of this August, according to Adamic, should shock no one: the “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling was the most popular. Adamic pointed out that the books “enjoy… the advantage that it was most often referred to as a series and our clustering algorithm lumped all Harry Potter books into the same cluster.” While some might believe the presence of “Potter” is due to a young sample age, Adamic wrote that the average age of the contributor was 37.

Meanwhile, Harper Lee’s classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” came in at number two and J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy – also a series – followed at number three. Tolkien’s other work, “The Hobbit,” took fourth place, while Jane Austen’s book “Pride and Prejudice” took fifth.

The Bible came in at sixth while Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” took seventh, the “Hunger Games” books by Suzanne Collins was number eight, “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger came in at number nine, and “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis was tenth. 

The list is fantasy and sci-fi heavy, with “Mockingbird,” “Rye,” and “Prejudice” some of the few books on the ranking that are set in our own world. In addition, the ranking shows just how many users bent the rules by including series (there are seven “Potter” books, after all). 

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