Book ranking algorithm
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover. I disagree; it’s a 5% factor in my book ranking algorithm. Sometimes I’ll be on the bus, reading my own business, when I’ll subtly lift my book cover to communicate to the world: Yeah, that’s right I’ve got sophisticated taste. I do understand this complex, societal issue; I’m reading a book about it. Whereas other times, I’ll hide my book because it poses the question: Is it weird to read a book for young adults if I’m not a young adult? Upon which I retort: back off inner voice... obviously it’s just for research purposes… I know I’ve finished 80 pages today already, but I’m not enjoying myself. Anyways, I strongly believe that your perception of a product can influence your enjoyment of that product. See any scholarly articles on the placebo effect for proof.
The other factors include overall impression which I call stars (35%), how well the book is written or impressive stylistic choices which I call quality (15%), how well the author can create a vivid world which I call wonder (20%), and how much I want to read the book which I call enjoyable (25%). If I wanted my factors to have good parallelism, I’d change “enjoyable” to “enjoyability” but - like most societal norms that maybe don’t make sense when you think about them - it’s tradition and I don’t want to change.
After finishing a book, I’ll score each of these factors on a scale of 1 to 5. For example, a book I read recently, So you want to talk about race (the book I’d hold up proudly on the bus) scored the following: Stars = 3, Quality = 5, Wonder = 2, Enjoyable = 3, Cover = 3. Then, excel formulaicly takes all the rankings for all the books I’ve ranked along a factor and spits out how many standard deviations away a specific book is from the average. And then... (the whole process being incredibly exciting, he said sarcastically (but deep down, not really sarcastic, because his brain is in the shape of a spreadsheet)) then excel will sum the five calculations, weighted by the percentages from above. And finally, the value is normalized on a scale of 1 to 100 so that I have means to compare every book I’ve ever read!
All the math is pretty simple, easily explainable from a statistics 101 course, but let’s pretend the algorithm is machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural network, [insert buzzword], one update away from becoming skynet. If you didn’t understand the algorithm summary in the previous paragraph, it’s only because it’s otherworldly complex; I’ve really created something revolutionary here.
I humbly present (the kind of humbly that’s the opposite of humility) my ranked list of books!
Important clarifier: The rankings were entered at the time that the books were read. So, even though most of the top books are children’s books, it’s only because back when I was a child, I had a bigger imagination - thus the reading experience was more magical. Children have bigger imaginations because they don’t know how the world actually is.
Harry Potter 99.9 Ready Player One 98.9 The Lightning Thief 98.8 The Curious Case of The Dog in the Nighttime 98.8 Raised in Captivity 98.7 The Hunger Games 98.5 Enders Game 98.2 The Circle 97.9 Shutter Island 97.7 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 97.3 Child 44 96.5 Eragon 95.4 Quiet 93.7 The Martian 92.2 Outliers 91.7 The Hobbit 91.3 The Fear Index 90.8 The Book Thief 90.3 20000 Leagues Under the Sea 89.4 The Great Turkey Walk 89.3 Jurrasic Park 88.3 The Devil in the White City 88.3 World War Z 88.3 Freakanomics 87.1 I Am Legend 87.1 Brave New World 85.8 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe 85.8 And Then There Were None 84.5 The Theif Lord 84.5 Time Cat 84.5 Life of Pi 83.1 Manhunt 83.1 The City of Ember 83.1 The Monster Ring 83.1 Atomic Habits 81.7 Maniac Magee 81.7 Moneyball 81.7 IT 81.6 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People 80.1 The Princess Bride 78.5 Aesop's Fables 78.4 The Alchemist 73.2 Game of Thrones 73.1 Magic Tree House 71.2 Where the Sidewalk Ends 69.2 Man's Search for Meaning 67.3 The Westing Game 67.3 Leviathan Wakes 67.2 The Odyssey 67.2 Lord of the Flies 65.1 The Great Gatsby 65.1 The Shinning 65.1 1001 Arabian Nights 63.1 Diary of a Wimpy Kid 63 Meddling Kids 63 The Five People You Meet in Heaven 60.8 The Black Cauldron 58.7 A Clockwork Orange 58.6 The Jungle 58.6 So you want to talk about race 54.1 The Inferno 54.1 The Old Man and the Sea 54.1 The Things they Carried 54.1 The Great Brain 51.9 The War of the Worlds 51.9 2001 A Space Odyssey 49.6 Blink 49.6 Frankenstein 49.6 Invisible Man 49.6 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 49.6 The Big Short 49.6 The Master and Margarita 49.6 Watershipdown 49.6 Zoo 49.6 The Song of Achilles 49.5 Pippi LongStocking 47.3 The Magician's Nephew 47.3 The Time Machine 47.3 Decameron 45.1 Total Money Makeover 45.1 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 45 The Shack 40.6 A Series of Unfortunate Events 38.4 Don Quixote 38.4 The Case for Christ 38.4 Ancillary Justice 36.3 Fantasy Life 36.2 Plot Perfect 36.2 On Writing 36.2 Dr. Doolittle 34.1 The Aeneid 34.1 Endurance 32.1 Charlie and The Choclate Factory 32 Crimson Shore 32 Daring Greatly 32 Gifted Hands 26.2 The Wind in the Willows 26.1 Beowulf 24.3 Eldest 22.6 Charlotte's Web 22.6 Darth Plageus 20.9 Twisted River 20.9 The Scarlet Letter 17.9 Alice in Wonderland 17.8 Emotional Inteligence 17.8 The Metamorphosis 17.8 The Phantom Tollbooth 16.3 The Adventures of Hucleberry Finn 15 To Kill a Mockingbird 15 A Wrinkle In Time 15 The Murder on the Orient Express 13.7 Boomsday 12.5 Never Eat Alone 12.5 Dune 11.4 The Outsiders 10.3 1984 9.3 Lord of the Rings 9.3 Epic of Gilgamesh 8.4 The Call of the Wild 8.4 Walker in the City 8.4 Dracula 7.5 The Darkest Evening of the Year 7.5 The Handmaid's Tale 6.8 Troy 6.8 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay 6 Tuesdays with Morrie 5.4 Gods of Eden 4.2 The Dark Net 3.3 The Eight 3.3 Artemis Fowl 2.9 Ha 2.9 The Boxcar Children 2.9 The Killer Angles 2.9 Anthem 2.6 Thirteen Reasons Why 2.2 A Tale of Two Cities 1.3 Cloud Atlas 1.3
