Web developer Christopher Pound mounted a data mining expedition deep into the free book lists at Project Gutenberg, creating a list of the 100 most popular books by 100 different authors on the site.
The top books list on Project Gutenberg is usually dominated by popular writers with more than one book, but this list creates a different kind of spread. We’ve linked to the top five books below for your weekend reading pleasure. Follow this link to explore the complete list:
As a follow-up to messing around with Goodreads and Project Gutenberg last week, I wondered what the top 100 list would look like with no duplicate authors, so I generated the list below, removing works by authors who have work higher on the list. What I like about the result is how dense it is with different themes, concerns, styles, etc. It’s an intriguing condensation of Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection and perhaps a better reading list for absorbing common literary reference points among works available in English.
Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2013 series. For all our readers returning from trips and vacation reading, we’ve created a short list of the stories you may have missed during this long, strange summer for the publishing industry.
Christopher Pound’s Top 5 Books by 5 Authors
1 Pride and Prejudice (Austen, Jane)
2 Jane Eyre (Brontë, Charlotte)
3 Little Women (Alcott, Louisa May)
4 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud))
5 The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas, Alexandre)
(Image via Horia Varlan)